Language, Truth, and Reality and Rhetorical Responsibility

 INTRODUCTION

This essay has two heuristic purposes: first, to explore some of the important theoretical and educational implications of rhetorical theory; second, to examine specific areas of rhetorical theory related the teaching of writing. The essay also has rhetorical purposes as well, the most important of which is to demonstrate that rhetoric has an essential role to play in today’s classrooms, not only as a heuristic tool but as a philosophical perspective. The object of this essay is not to elaborate on that role but to explore the connection between language, truth, and reality that gives the discipline of rhetoric so much philosophical and educational significance. 

Language and Truth

The philosophical and educational role of rhetoric has received renewed interest during the past three decades because of a growing understanding and appreciation of the influence of language on the concept of truth. Interestingly, the Greeks appear to have recognized this close connection in their identification of truth with logos, which means “either reason or order in worlds or things” (Runes, Dictionary of Philosophy 183). Heraclitus said, “All things come to pass in accordance with this Logos” and “Logos is common to all,” though he believed as well that “most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own” (Wheelwright, The Presocratics 69). In other words, truth, language, thought, and reality are all linked in the same way the Trinity is a tri-model manifestation of the same reality. Because logos manifests itself in language as it does in the world, language does not merely mirror truth but embodies it.

However, as the critical, philosophical attitude developed among Greek thinkers, they began to distinguish clearly between true knowledge and false belief or opinion. If language can embody the truth, it can also misrepresent it. In Plato’s philosophy the distinction between truth and falsehood is clearly defined. Truth exists transcendentally in the realm of the forms or ideas, and falsehood exists immanently in the realm of the material world. Thus, logos or the truth gives intelligibility (Runes 184) to the world but exists outside of it. This means that language per se does not embody the truth but merely reflects it. In the Cratylus Plato has Socrates say that knowledge of things is not to be derived from names but from the study of the things themselves (Trans. Benjamin Jowett, The Collected Dialogues of Plato 473). This radical separation of language from truth seriously devaluated language and the discipline of rhetoric, which is essentially a study of the uses of language. Thus, Plato’s became the first philosophy to espouse a representational theory of truth, which required the human mind to somehow know reality directly in order to determine whether language correctly mirrored it.

Today, however, it is recognized that language does not merely mirror reality (or the Truth) but significantly contributes to its construction. To begin to understand this relationship, one can first consider the Aristotelian theory of perception. Aristotle believed that the world is not perceived directly but through the imagination. He says that we can receive “the sensible forms of things without their matter, as wax receives the imprint of a signet-ring without receiving the iron or gold of which it is made” (Aristotle, ed. and trans. by Philip Wheelwright 134). The form of the impression reflects the reality of the object. If the form is clear, the impression will accurately reflect the world. Already, Aristotle begins to raise suggestive questions about human access to reality; for example, he asks whether or not certain aspects of reality can be known without the proper sense organ. He gives the example of the sense of smell: “Hence nothing that cannot smell is ever acted upon by odor” (Aristotle 135). In other words, the world reveals itself only within the limits of the receptive abilities of the human organism.

There are a number of very significant elements in Aristotle’s theory of perception. First, he raises the question of just what gives human access to reality, and he concludes that this access begins with the senses. Second, he develops a correspondence theory of perception, which means that mental images mirror the world and are true or false according to how accurate the correspondence is. Third, he points out that the range of perceptual data received by humans is limited by the nature and capability of human sense organs. This model becomes even more interesting if language is introduced as a perceptual faculty, as it will be momentarily. But first the Kantian theory of perception must be introduced.

Immanuel Kant’s theory of perception is revolutionary. He states that human perception does not simply receive emanations of objects and reflects them in the imagination. Instead, he argues that the mind consists of perceptual faculties or categories that translated sense data into meaningful objects. For example, the “forms of perception,” space and time, unify experience into spatial-temporal fields. In other words, to quote John Kemp, “our imagination, with the help of pure concepts provided by the understanding, performs the combinatory activity which is necessary to make sense of, or give structure to, material presented to us” (The Philosophy of Kant 21). For Aristotle, the phenomena of the world sent emanations or likenesses of themselves to the human sense organs, but for Kant the phenomenal world is chaotic and becomes organized through the “synthesis of apprehension” (Kemp 28). Kemp explains: 

The upshot of all this is that nature is subject to the categories, not because things in themselves are so subject (things in themselves have their own laws, of which we can know nothing), but because nature is nothing for us except as it appears to us, and the way in which it appears to us is determined in its general characteristics by the fact that our intellects have to apply the categories before they can make any sort of sense of the multiplicity of sense impressions which are presented to us. (29)

Kant’s theory expands the role of the human mind in determining what is real and true. Kant also introduces the disturbing notion that ultimate reality cannot be known because of the inherent limitations of human perception and knowledge. At this point Plato’s criticism of human knowledge seems validated. In this world, humans cannot know reality directly (except for certain logical and mathematical properties). However, there is a significant difference between Kant and Plato. For Kant, knowledge and reality are inherently human or profoundly influenced by the human mind. Kant accepts this and thus accepts the fact that humans must work within the epistemological context given to them. Plato, on the other hand, would be frustrated by the built-in human bias contained even in the dialectic or scientific modes of understanding. Yet, Plato also seems to be aware that a problem of this sort is a possibility. Near the end of the Cratylus he has Socrates say, “How real existence is to be studied or discovered is, I suspect, beyond you and me” (473). Socrates adds, however, that knowledge of things will not be derived from names (language?).

Of course, this was what the sophists were saying all along. In his heart Socrates was religiously and romantically devoted to the truth, but in his mind he appears to acknowledge that direct access to the truth did not seem possible. He simply refused to settle for anything less than the unmediated truth, and this is why he rejected rhetoric. However, rhetoric becomes an important activity when the truth cannot be known directly because, as writers like Stephen Toulmin and Thomas Kuhn explain, the truth becomes a matter of consensus within an investigative and critical environment that is constantly probing, questioning, and changing.

The principle of consensus becomes even more significant for those who believe that reality is constructed. This view is an off-shoot of Kant’s theory but the constructive principles broaden not only to include the mental apparatus of the mind but also constructive fields created by society and language. Radical constructionists reject the claim that the true is that which corresponds to an independent, objective reality. Ernst von Glasersfeld says, 

Radical constructivism, thus, is radical because it breaks with convention and develops a theory of knowledge in which knowledge does not reflect an “objective” ontological reality, but exclusively an ordering and organization of a world constituted by our experience. (“An Introduction to Radical Constructivism,” The Invented Reality, edited Paul Watzlawick 24) 

Though constructionism has its roots in Kantian philosophy, it breaks with the latter by identifying the constructive mechanism with symbol, generally with culture as a symbolic system and specifically with language, the substance of symbol. The fundamental tenet of constructionism is that we do not know (or even perceive, for that matter) “being” directly but only in a form mediated by the human mind (as a kind of instrument) and by symbol. Thus, reality is not known or understood by an individual but through the individual's language and culture. This is not to imply that an individual does not bring something unique to the experience of the world. He or she does: the uniqueness of an individual life or set of personal experiences. Each person is a unique history, and this personal history colors an individual’s perception and understanding of the world. However, an individual also exists within a particular language and cultural system that is a particular pattern of beliefs—a tapestry of belief woven from the material of language. It is within this tapestry that reality and truth reside. To continue the metaphor, the magic carpet of language and culture is what carries each individual into the world.

It is most important, however, to understand that though in one way language or culture is somehow separated from the world or being, this does not mean that humans are trapped solipsistically by their language and culture. This is not the point at all. The human presence in this world allows being (that which is/reality) to reveal itself to that presence. What is revealed is not purely subjective (belonging only to the subject) nor purely objective (belonging only to the object). What is revealed is the world from the perspective of human beings. In other words, there is no world separate from human being (the Cartesian split); there is only (human) conscious-being-in-the-world. This is a single reality. William Luijpen puts it this way: 

If man is fastened to the world, then the world also is fastened to man, so that it is impossible to speak about a world-without-man. In other words, the world is radically human. (Phenomenology and Humanism 64) 

In a sense, the world gives us what we need, what we seek, what we are capable of receiving. The gift (of knowledge) is something from the world, the flesh and reality of the world, but the world is always more than that which is given, and, in as sense, we can never comprehend the abundance of the in-itself, i.e., that which lies beyond the horizon of our presence. The existence of religion is ultimately testimony to the fact that the ultimate being of the world must remain a mystery for humans. This means only that we recognize that our understandings are ours, in some profound way belong to us and thus cannot fully express the reality of that which is other than ourselves.

Even the very notion of reality is a human one. We stumble upon the world and immediately assume that it must be something, and so we embark upon the immense task of transforming it into something, a task which has as much to do with knowing ourselves as with knowing the world. But in transforming the world into reality we humanize it. The tree, the ocean, the sky—they all become familiar things, things whose realities we take for granted as much as we do those of the things we create: the car, the ball, the hat, the radio, etc. But the difference is profound and absolute. Regardless of how much we know of a tree, its being ultimately will continue to reside in mystery. But by giving the name tree to the object, it becomes an object for-us, something we can comprehend, something no longer absolutely foreign. This is also true of our utilization of trees—for recreation, lumber, and fruit. Treating trees as use objects tends to make them familiar to us in the way the things we build for ourselves are familiar. Trees then become gifts from nature, which by giving us what we need befriends us. What is lost or forgotten, however, is the inherent primordial mystery of trees.

In this sense the constructionists and Kant agree fully—that the noumenon (the real world as opposed to the appearing world) of the world will always reside beyond human comprehension, for even if humans were to discover the Truth about the world, they would have no way of demonstrating that what they had discovered was in fact the Truth. Thus, he Platonic pursuit of truth needs to be abandoned or qualified. I say qualified only because the belief in and the search for the truth expresses a relationship to the world that human being cannot escape, for logical, emotional, and psychological reasons.

Logically, even epistemological positions that deny the possibility of absolute truth are based on a particular view of reality, which is itself absolute. The moral relativist, for example, is not a relativist when it comes to claiming moral relativism, and the Kantian who claims that absolute reality cannot be known implies that there exists an absolute reality that cannot be known. Emotionally and psychologically humans need to believe in absolutes because it is the commitment to absolutes that sustains the will, that encourages efforts to live a life that meets ideal standards.

This need is expressed dramatically and paradoxically by the character of Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Bazarov, a proclaimed nihilist, denies all principles and social institutions, saying, “There are no principles in general.... There are only sensations. Everything depends on them” (133). Yet, though Bazarov denies principles in general he does so for the most idealistic reason, so that a just society replaces the unjust society created by the traditional Russian aristocracy. The reason why people require absolute truth is that truth establishes and defines their relationship to the world, and this relationship defines the proper life to be lived.

It is natural that people want to believe that their relationship to the world is the correct one because if it is not, they are living a life that is false and empty, a life that is not only inauthentic but lacking reality. Such a life is fraught with ontological anxiety, the fear of one’s own lack of reality. In James Joyce’s short story “A Little Cloud,” the main character, Chandler, senses acutely his own nothingness. Intuitively, he believes that his life is false, and he believes this because he has a very clear idea of what living truly would be for him. Thus, he is an ontological ghost passing his days in unending regret.

Consequently, it seems that though one can reject the possibility of absolute truth or at least of knowing it, one must live in the belief that it does exist and can be known. This was Kant’s conclusion. However, this commitment to absolute, universal truth does not explain away the predicament of not being able to verify the absoluteness and universality of one’s beliefs. It only illustrates the importance of absolutes—ontological, epistemological, and ethical—to human beings. However, regardless of one’s philosophical position toward the existence or knowability of absolute truth, one must recognize the importance of language in the revelation of truth. 

Language and Reality

In an article titled “The Resources of Language,” Friedrich Waismann says the following: 

If we spoke a different language we would perceive a different world. By growing up in a certain language, by thinking in its semantic and syntactical grooves, we acquire a certain more or less uniform outlook on the world—an outlook we are scarcely aware of until (say) by coming across a language of a totally different structure we are shocked into seeing the oddity of the obvious, or what seemed to be obvious. Finally, I want to say that philosophy begins with distrusting language—that medium that pervades, and warps, our very thought.

The point is that it supplies us with certain categorical forms without which the formation of a coherent system of experience, a world picture, would be impossible. (The Importance of Language 108) 

Waismann is making the linguistic point that thinking in a particular language influences how one perceives reality, and thus conceives truth. Throughout most of human history this characteristic of language was either not recognized, fully understood, or fully appreciated. People existed within a particular language system (including both the linguistic structure of the language and the language’s mythical content), and it was through this language system that the world was revealed. Within a coherent language system, the reality of the world will remain homogeneous, and it was almost impossible for the individual to step outside of the language system to understand the influence of language on thinking, perception, truth, and reality.

The Greeks were certainly the first to study systematically the use of language to shape thought and to investigate language’s relationship to reality. Undoubtedly, one of the factors that enabled them to step outside their language was the demands that their changing society placed upon their language. Their culture’s becoming at once more democratic and more commercial required more sophisticated uses of uses of language. These demands resulted in a need to better understand the function of language, resulting in language being understood as a tool, a highly abstract tool, but a tool nonetheless. And this objectification of language enabled the Greeks to approach it from the outside. At that point, Language ceased to be an invisible matrix that enveloped human beings. Increasingly it was understood as the medium of communication and thought used for understanding the world and communicating one’s thoughts and feelings about the world.

However, once JudeoChristianity had become the dominate worldview in the West, the language of Christianity (which included much of the philosophical language of the ancient Greeks but Christianized) sealed up the world once more in a homogenous linguistic universe. Not until the beginning of the Enlightenment did the dominance of the JudeoChristian worldview begin to decline. Up until this time JudeoChristianity defined thinking in the West. It was the West’s great river of thought. And though tributaries of language inconsistent with JudeoChristianity fed into this great river, they were either transformed, Christianized, or lost in the magnitude of its current.

About three-hundred years ago the river reached a sea, fanning out into all directions at once, both its identity and directions disappeared in the sea. What was the sea? It was, and is, many things but most of all endless new information that produced leviathans of doubt that harried old archaic ideas.  Science had become a young, powerful worldview that now sought to separate itself from religion; however, in spite of the wealth of information that science provided, it was science’s critical attitude—not its content—that most influenced moderns. It required that all beliefs be questioned and established rigid standards for beliefs to be accepted as legitimate. Most traditional view could not meet these standards.

Also, science and technology helped bring into existence a different world—a world of commerce, wealth, progress, and materialism. It was a world where modern forms of transportation and communication could unite all the cultures and worldviews into a single global lifeworld. The global village of Marshall McLuhan had become a single site in which was gathered all the ideas, experiences, and beliefs of a heterogenic world. The modern world had become a Disney World, where the visitor could pick and choose among cultures and worldviews, selecting those that seemed most attractive and satisfying.

Because of the multiplicity, as well as the trivialization, of worldviews, it is imperative that people  understand the nature of worldviews and their relationship to language: the underlying theme here is of course that the worldviews are invented by, preserved in, and expressed through language. In other words, it is important that people have a definite rhetorical sensibility if they are to understand and be able to adapt to the modern world as well as to critically evaluate ideologies old and new that continue to entrap lives. I will now begin a closer analysis of how language establishes a relationship between the individual and reality by comparing the worldview and language of the scientist with that of the artist.

The world for the artist is merely a construct of language—which is the stuff of human subjectivity, not a world created ex nihilo, but neither an object dangling in space and time—fixed, complete, and self-contained. No, for the artist, the world is experience. And no writer has expressed this notion more beautifully than Virginia Woolf. She opens her novel The Waves with the following sentences: The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.” (Woolf’s italics, 1). What she describes is not the world as an object in-itself but as an object of perception. But as we have already noted, perception is informed by language. Woolf in this passage gives us the perspective of a child, but we get this perspective through language, her language. Furthermore, her language gives us only one of an endless number of perspectives.

To use Jean-Paul Sartre’s conception of the revelatory nature of human being, the presence of human being allows the world to be revealed. Sartre’s words express this wonderfully: “It is we who set up a relationship between this tree and that bit of sky. Thanks to us, that star which has been dead for millennia, that quarter moon, and that dark river are disclosed in the unity of a landscape” (Literature & Existentialism 23).

The points that I want to emphasize here are that landscape is the revealing element (and we are the bearers of language) and that in the modern world people have become self-conscious of this process because the language they live within is no longer a given; they must seek it out, creating from it the worldview they believe to be most true, honest, and meaningful.

The artist has always been the one who recognized—though perhaps not in any scientific fashion—that languages fashion the world and peoples’ relationship to it and to one another. The artist has also characterized the ontological, ethical, and aesthetic openness that is now associated with the modern temperament. Finally, the artist is most aware of the interwoven intimacy that exists between the world and the subject. Science has attempted to minimize this intimacy in an attempt to reveal the world objectively, as it is in-itself. But in fact this is only one perspective—one that significantly reduces the meaning of the world. The language of art invites closeness with the world as it invites the reader (listener or viewer) to explore new relationships and understandings. The scientist seeks Truth—universal, absolute, and objective. The artist seeks truth—personal, subjective, and emotional. Says Waismann, “Poetry is forever groping along the borders of the unspeakable, wresting new land from the vast void of the unexpressed” (116).

However, the truth of the artist contains in its own way universality, even if it is the truth of a single person. Like a lone tree burning upon the vast prairie, it can be witnessed by anyone. It is a unique event unlike any other. It may be even totally unexpected and perhaps even unbelievable. And yet there it is: Upon the great empty expanse a column of fire fueled by the life of a single tree reaches briefly to the cloudless blue sky. Except for a single subjectivity, the event slips into nothingness, to occur never again.

What really occurred? After investigating the ashes, the surrounding area, the time of day, etc., the scientist would explain that the fire, like the tree itself, was a highly improbable occurrence caused by a unique combination of factors—the sun’s rays striking a piece of glass at just the right angle, the presence of dry grass, just enough breeze to ignite the fire and blow the ashes upward into the leaves of the tree, which were especially dry due to months of hot, dry weather. And if the scientist told you the story, you would have to agree that his understanding of the event was correct, universally correct. And even if the scientist had overlooked some relevant piece of evidence, you would still say that what he said was true if only because it was possibly true, even if highly unlikely.

But had the subject been a pioneer woman, whose family had newly staked out their claim upon the treeless expanse, would she have seen exactly what the scientist saw? No. She could not have seen what he saw, not exactly. She knew of the tree. It was part of the home she was creating. When her husband said that the tree should be cut down, she objected. There was only that tree, and its old, twisted trunk could not have provided enough usable wood for anything but the fire. It would be a sin and a crime to cut down such a tree. For the pioneer woman the tree was her friend and companion when she on her lonely walks. She could talk to the tree, and her children loved to play on and about the tree. Besides, it was old and beautiful. In the light of the setting sun the old tree became so beautiful that it brought tears to the woman’s eyes. And when she became discouraged, she would go to look at the tree and feel its presence upon the lonely plain. It spoke to the woman silently about enduring. So the woman came to love the tree.

And on that day when she discovered that the tree was burning she did not think of why it was burning, no more than she would think such things if one of her children suddenly died. She felt only loss. This was not merely the burning of the tree but a friend suddenly dying before her. She could almost feel the flames consume her own flesh as she fell upon her knees weeping. The tree that had been a sign endurance and courage to her had suddenly perished. She felt an overwhelming oppression crushing her to the earth. She was alone in a vast emptiness. If only the tree had remained, she might have endured. This thought came to her mind because at the very moment she saw the tree being consumed, she believed that she could not endure. Like the tree she did not belong in that empty wilderness.

Why the tree had been in this place, she did not know. It did not belong there. Probably some traveler had carried the seed from the east where the great forests grew, and the seed had fallen to the ground and miraculously had taken root. The pioneer woman thought of the home she had left behind. It had been a place of many trees, of a community and family. She felt in the loss of the tree all that she had left behind. And now the tree was gone, and there was nothing but emptiness, and she felt this emptiness in her. She remained upon her knees for a long time, and she might have spent the entire night in that spot had she not heard the long grass rustle in the late afternoon breeze. She would never forget the burning of the tree that had encouraged and comforted her during her first year on the Great Plains. As the years passed the tree and its burning took on even deeper meaning for the woman.

Where is the truth in the pioneer woman’s experience of the burning tree? It is easy to understand the truth of this event for the scientist because the scientist only attempts to understand one aspect of the burning tree, the mechanics of combustion. But for the woman the burning of the tree is a much broader event because for her the tree is more than an isolated thing. It is part of her lifeworld experience. It is an object of special concern and as such has broader significance for her. Yet, though her relationship to the tree is different from that of the scientist, it is fundamentally the same because each individual experience of the tree is subjective. The subjectivity of the scientist is precisely defined and formalized. The scientist’s experience of the burning tree is experience or subjectivity that has been restricted or limited by the criteria of scientific objectivity. In other words, the relationship between the scientist and the burning tree is also essentially subjective, but it is a formalized, codified subjectivity. It is subjectivity with preconceived criteria for what will be considered meaningful and meaningless. But even these criteria are subjective. For the scientist that which is meaningful is that which can be predicted, tested, and utilized.

The pioneer woman’s experience of the burning tree also has subjective preconceptions, but these are not formal or codified but simply the content of her own personal life experience. Is her experience of the burning tree false? Of course not. Even the scientist would not deny the truth of her experience. But the scientist would say that such truth is not useful, but useless to science because such truth is too personal and beyond codification and predictability. The universality of the pioneer woman’s experience of the burning tree is contained in our acceptance of her experience. It may not be our experience, yet that does not lessen its reality or universality. And though such experience cannot be codified as precisely, preferably quantifiably, as the scientist’s, it is an experience that is archetypal, for it is the experience of loss, suffering, and death.

Furthermore, though such an experience does not have the kind of utility that comes from being predictable within a precise range of probability, the highly personal experience of the pioneer woman is not without utility. In the same way the tree had many meanings for the woman, the woman’s experience may have many meanings for those who hear or read of her experiences. She too can become a friend, a soul-mate, a source of sorrow, comfort, or encouragement, a reminder of the human struggle for survival and significance, a new way of understanding or responding to the world, an expression of the subjective nature of our encounters with the world, a reminder that all things must die and that in death all things are related. The pioneer woman’s experience is significant but too unique to be comprehended by the strict methodologies of science. As an object of literary art, however, her experience is significant because the truth she illustrates is nonquantifiable lived truth that is as emotional as it is intellectual, and as such reveals the world as felt experience.

The truth in both cases is revelatory, each revealing different aspects of reality. The difference between the two is that the scientist imposes restrictions for what will count as real, whereas the pioneer woman imposes no restrictions so that the reality of the world reveals itself within the full range of her subjectivity: sensate, emotional, cognitive, and experiential. Thus, for example, the tree can become a friend, a thing of beauty, a fellow creature, and so on. Even more relevant to this study, the reality of the tree is revealed through the linguistic universe of the observers. The scientist experiences the tree within the context of his (or her) scientific training, which includes concepts such as process, cause and effect, objectivity, verifiability, quantification, empiricism, and analysis.

The scientist also has been trained to operate within the language of science. He will understand or interpret the experience through the language that he used to describe the experience. The woman is unable to make such distinctions. She sees the world from the entirety of her linguistic and personal history. In a sense, she is unable to see the tree from the perspective of the scientist because she lacks his professional training and his scientific detachment. Nevertheless, her experience of the tree is more complete than that of the scientist because it is an experience based on the entirety of her life-experience.

One might argue that her experience cannot be reduced to language alone because it is experience influenced by the unique collective experience of one individual’s life. This is of course true; however, her history is also a linguistic history. As a child she began to interpret experience in terms of the language she was acquiring. In fact, she grew up in a world that was already defined by the language of culture. Furthermore, language and experience of the world is a dialectic. Returning to the Greeks, as the Greeks’ social-political-economic world changed, new demands were placed upon their language, which itself changed and adapted. But until the language changed, the Greeks could not understand the new realities of their circumstances. When the new languages of art, myth, politics, science, commerce, law, etc., appeared, the realities of the Greek world changed. These languages created the gestalts of consciousness through which the world is perceived and understood. About this James Burke says, “The structure [gestalt] therefore sets the values, bestows meaning, determines the morals, ethics, aims, limitations and purpose of life. It imposes on the external world the contemporary version of reality” (The Day the Universe Changed 310).

To further demonstrate the influence of language on perception I would draw the attention to the above text that describes the experience of the scientist and that of the pioneer woman. Through these texts, the reader is drawn into different perspectives of the world, that is, exposed to different realities latent in the world. The task of rhetoric is to introduce one to the important revelatory function of language. This task is especially important today for a number of reasons. First, no dominate language system exists. This means that individuals must find for themselves linguistic perspectives that reveal the world in ways that are meaningful and beneficial to them, to others, and to the world.  Second, some linguistic perspectives are better than others. Some are hurtful and destructive; some trivialize experience; some are narrow, thus leaving invisible significant areas of experience and reality; some are degrading to the earth and its creatures; and finally some are the products of powerful social institutions that seek not to liberate and enrich human subjectivity but to enslave, manipulate, and/or commodify it. The irony here is that rhetoric can be used to enslave and to liberate. Consequently, it becomes the task of society to enhance rhetorical awareness in order to reveal what language can do as language in order to prepare the individual to live meaningfully and freely in a world that has become a tempestuous sea of language that can easily destroy the inexperience sailor.

Plato was the first to put people on guard concerning the powerful influence of rhetoric on what and how people think. The dialogue The Gorgias is a study of how rhetoric can mislead. In The Phaedrus the reader discovers how language can be critically examined to determine whether its claims are valid or invalid. Plato believed the method of dialectic analysis was the best method for getting at the truth concerning a problem or issue. Basically, it is an approach based on an initial attitude of skepticism. Socrates, Plato’s spokesman, refuses to accept at face value claims made by those he engages in discussion. All claims must be scrutinized and tested (not so much empirically but logically). The irony here is that Plato himself would use his masterful rhetorical skills to fabricate one of the most influential yet erroneous views of reality that would be used to reinforce JudeoChristianity’s denigration of material world of nature.

Language and the Individual

Rhetoric is important not only because the rhetorical stance is essential if one is going to create successfully a meaningful and beneficial worldview, but also if one is going to participate cognitively in the creation of one’s self (and even the self of others for those who have such influence, such as teachers and parents).

Jerome Bruner says, “French toys create consumers” (Actual Minds, Possible Worlds 130). His point is that consumer society is made up of languages. Most obviously it is the language of advertisement and fashion. But it is also the language of the objects of the society. (An automobile, for example, is much more than a transportation device.) They are symbols, metaphors, messages—that make a statement for those who make them and for those who use them. The problem occurs when the dominance of a particular language game obscures all other possibilities. This is a problem not simply because the dominate game may be harmful or distorted, but because it simply prevents individuals from seeing other possibilities of “being-in-the-world.”

The self is a text. We (our understanding of reality, our moral attitudes, our values, our goals, our estimation of others, etc.) consist of the narratives that we have internalized from culture. We interpret ourselves as a text (Bruner 131).

Awareness of rhetoric allows us to understand the role that texts play in forming our lives and opening them to other possible modes of being and to other possible interpretations of reality. Just as rhetoric can enslave us, it can free us. And this type of freedom is probably what Plato feared most about rhetoric: the freedom of multiple interpretations of the world and of being in it. Plato understood freedom mainly as doing the right (rational) thing. This freedom is essential to the well-being of human beings. When a doctor is making a diagnosis, he must use reason to eliminate false diagnoses. There can be only one correct diagnosis.

But the freedom of rhetoric is the opening up of possibilities, which may not have been discovered through dialectic or other logical methods. The doctor who is a rhetorician will understand that in some cases the scientific paradigm may not be the best method for approaching a problem or its solution. For example, a doctor may become a psychologist, social, worker, artist, philosopher, or friend in determining and treating a medical condition.

In Tolstoy’s story The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ivan hates his doctors because they never step out of their role as doctors, even when they know no treatment will save him. It is the peasant Gerisim who responds to Ivan simply as a human being whom Ivan appreciates most. Other characters categorize Ivan according to their own mindset (father, husband, or colleague) and respond to him accordingly. Gerisim’s response seems free of any particular way of thinking. He is employed by Ivan as his servant, yet Gerisim’s caring for Ivan does not appear to be dictated by a master-servant relationship. His sympathetic, caring response seems to transcend language. The Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan has a similar theme. The Samaritan does not categorize and then judge a man who has been robbed, beaten, and left lying on the side of the road. He simply response to the man as a human being and aids him. On the other hand, the priest and Levite also see the injured man but their religious language game causes them to judge the man as unclean and thus to be avoided. So they pass to the other side of road and continue on their way.

On the other hand, Robert Terwilliger, “Words can put a set of blinders on the individual—but we can also see that they may facilitate his behavior in other situations” (Meaning and Mind: A Study of the Psychology of Language 274). The stories just describe do just this. They open the reader’s mind to different ways of responding to the world, even suggesting that one should consider whether or not society or a language game has narrowed one’s worldview with blinders. Many of the texts of postmodern culture are designed to promote consumption. Says Jean Baudrillard, “Marketing, purchasing, sales, the acquisition of differentiated commodities and object/signs—all of these presently constitute our language, a code with which our entire society communicates and speaks of and to itself (“The Ecstasy of Communication.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster  48). People might not wish to give themselves over to consumption—to becoming essentially consumers—if they were aware of other ways of being in the world (other lebensforms to use Wittgenstein’s term). However, if people are unaware of other language games (a term introduced by Wittgenstein), then they may not be able to evaluate the language game that is determining their mode of being in the world.

To illustrate how texts can present or reveal reality, both human and nonhuman, differently and by doing so offer a different path for the development of the self, I provide a lengthy excerpt from Land of the Spotted Eagle by Luther Standing bear: 

In talking to children, the old Lakota would place a hand on the ground and explain: “We sit in the lap of our mother. From her we, and all other living things, come. We shall soon pass, but the place where we now rest will last forever.” So we, too, learned to sit or lie on the ground and become conscious of life about us in its multitude of forms. Sometimes we boys would sit motionless and watch the swallow, the tiny ants, or perhaps some small animal at its work and ponder on its industry and ingenuity; or we lay on our backs and looked long at the sky and when the stars came out made shapes from the various groups.... The old people told us to heed wa maka skan, which were the “moving things of the earth.” This meant, of course, the animals that lived and moved about, and the stories they told of wa maka skan increased our interest and delight. The wolf, the duck, eagle, hawk, spider, bear, and other creatures, had marvelous powers, and each one was useful and helpful to us. Then there were the warriors who lived in the sky and dashed about on their spirited horses during a thunder storm, their lances clashing with the thunder and glittering with the lightning. There was wiwila, the living spirit of the spring, and the stones that flew like a bird and talked like a man. Everything was possessed of personality, only differing with us in form. Knowledge was inherent in all things. The world was a library and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks, and the birds, and animals that shared, alike with us, the storms and blessings of the earth. We learned to do what only the student of nature ever learns, and that was to feel beauty. (194) 

This text offers a unique relationship to the world, an understanding of the world, and a way of being in the world—all of which together offers a different path for the developing the self—that is radically different from most Western thought, but especially different from the messages sent by consumer culture of the late 20th century.  In addition, the passage reveals the importance of language and rhetoric. The old Lakota is a storyteller, and his words reveal his vision of the world. Through those words his young listeners are to share that vision and perception of the world—one that might otherwise not be available them. And when such text is lost or replaced by newer texts, a unique vision of the world is lost.

Narrowly defined terms provide peoples’ lives and activities with structure. If a person had to constantly ponder the meaning of words, he or she would never accomplish anything, would be unreliable, and would be very insecure about the world and its inhabitants. Even negative stereotypes (such as black cats are bad luck) give the subject a clear course of action—fight or flight. Such narrowly defined language gives the subject a sense of security about the nature of the world and the courses of action to be taken in response to others. An approach to the world that interprets others ambiguously is more stressful—even if more accurate.

Another example would be the attitude of the settlers of the New World toward its native peoples and nature. It was much easier—practically, morally, and psychologically—to believe that nature and the native peoples were inferior beings that had to be removed or transformed in order that civilization could be established. The alternative was to allow a situation that would be morally uncomfortable, economically disadvantageous, and politically complex. In other words, people often choose to view the world—that is, create a cultural narrative—in a way that is first of all useful to their lives and only secondarily factually accurate. But in doing so, they also cut themselves off from other forms of seeing and being that are both profoundly revealing and deeply meaningful.

Recently, women have made a concerted effort to revise the language of their culture, a language that has both distorted their meaning as human beings and limited their possibilities for living. Here are some of the words for women that are sexually abusive and sexual: “dish, piece, piece of ass, piece of tail.” The main point is that there are many more such words for women than there are for men.  An important issue is the effect these words have on the perception of women within society. These words transform women into things, specifically, object of consumption (as well as objects of derision and contempt). And once humans are reified, they can be treated merely as things because things are generally thought of as having no moral rights. Of course, the basis of this treatment lies in the very perception of the woman, which has been influenced by language.

The rhetorical issue here is freeing oneself from linguistic determinism, which can influence not only one’s attitude toward others but influence the kind of individual one becomes: black males perceiving themselves as violent or women perceiving themselves as sex objects. This is a rhetorical issue because it has to do with the general question of using language to achieve certain desired ends (which is not a question of linguistics, philosophy, or philology). Rhetoric deals with how we use language to achieve our purposes. The Greek rhetoricians were concerned exactly with this use of language, and Plato certainly understood that how language is used can have far reaching consequences—including peace and war and even strict limits being imposed upon free speech. 

Language and Education

Bruner says, “Language necessarily imposes a perspective in which things are view and a stance toward what we view” (121). This defines much of what rhetoric should seek to do in an educational environment: to free the mind from slavery to any single language game or system, to open the mind to the possibility of other language games, and to make the mind aware of the influence of langue upon its understanding and appreciation of the world. This does not mean, of course, that the purpose of rhetoric is to undermine belief systems. In fact, the rhetorical perspective is characterized by openness. It only seeks to make the student aware of the role of language in his or her life.

Rhetoric can also do this by drawing the students’ attention to the various forums of deliberation or exploration that exist in all cultures, but are most pervasive in Western cultures. Bruner says that culture should be looked upon as a kind of forum. He says, “Indeed, every culture maintains specialized institutions or occasions for intensifying this ‘forum-like’ feature. Storytelling, theater, science, even jurisprudence are all techniques for intensifying this function—ways of exploring possible worlds out of the context of immediate need” (123).

But this view of culture as forum conflicts with the view that understands culture as an authority. In this view, education is a process of transmission of knowledge and values by those who know more to those who know less and know less expertly. This is the Platonic view which understands reality to be fixed and unchanging—which means that the ideal society, social institutions, ways of life (individual and social), goods to be sought, etc., do not change. In fact, change is often dangerous because it may lead away from the ideal. The problem of this view arises with its tendency toward totalitarianism of the ideal and the inability to provide universal verification, leaving many groups believing that they have the truth.

Robert Terwilliger’s understanding of teaching is useful here. It is something closer to training. He uses the military as an example. The efficient use of the military depends on using a language the words of which are narrowly defined. Thus, words are given a single or very narrow range of meaning. This ensures precise communication (a reduction of ambiguity) and more reliable (predictable) responses from those who receive the communication. The same is true for other groups that must solve problems, often under restricting conditions such as time constraints. An example would be a surgical team. During an operation each member of the team must react quickly and accurately to the commands of the surgeons performing the operation. Ambiguity can result in mistakes or dangerous delays.

Traditional education was designed pretty much to train minds, not to open them. Educational institutions were created to produce useful workers and citizens—not philosophers. Nazi Germany was an extreme—but otherwise not unusual—example of a nation using its educational institutions to train rather than to educate (in the sense of opening the mind). The training included not only the skills to perform needed work, but propaganda which trained the mind to see the world in only certain terms (“terms” meaning language categories). As Terwilliger says, training is a process of establishing certain meanings by eliminating others.

The non-Aryan, for example, became for the Nazis non-human. (The syllogism is simple enough to construct.) What of all the other meanings and language games (of philosophy, literature, poetry, history, etc.) of the German culture? They were declared acceptable if compatible with the new language game. What was not compatible was ignored or discredited. This is an important point. Because reality is constructed, truth becomes contextual. There is no extra-textual metalanguage that one can appeal to—like that of the Bible. Thus, no language game is completely safe from being discredited. This occurs, Bruner explains, by simply relegating incompatible elements to another language game that one is not playing.

The result of the considerable autonomy of language games is conflict. Western history can be traced very neatly by its major conflicts, which occurred especially often in the 20^th century between groups existing in separate, opposing language games. Nelson Goodman’s explanation of world creation or worldmaking  (Of Mind and Other Matters 31) suggests that the perspective of socially created reality can avoid such conflict because it does not view language games as an either-or situation. The principle of non-contradiction is suspended between language games or worlds (to use Goodman’s term), though not within a particular world. In a sense, the Germans could believe that Jews were inferior, but would also have to accept and respect that other perspectives exist. Also, the fact that there exists no ultimate method of verification means that people cannot hold beliefs with the certainty that their beliefs are accurate reflections of an independently existing reality. Of course, people can go on hating one another for whatever reason, and there is nothing that can finally be done to stop this—because of the nature and limits and of language, language games, and their epistemological methods.

The only hope, to use Terwilliger’s phrasing (311), is to remove “the blinders” placed on thinking thus behavior that limit linguistic categories. Opening up the categories through education—that is, immersion into the worlds of language—will result in what I will call the “rhetorical attitude.” The rhetorical attitude is one that refuses to allow itself to be dominated by or a slave to any particular language game or worldview. One having this attitude continues to live within language games but recognizes the epistemological and ontological status of such games. There are two cardinal principles of the rhetorical attitude. First, worldviews are created through language and thus do not have the absolute status of being the Truth. Second, language changes and by doing so changes the world; thus attitudes or worldviews must be flexible. The responsibilities that this attitude imposes upon the individual are simple: One must retain an open mind when deciding important issues, being willing to enter into other language games to gain a comprehensive view of various perspective; one must realize and consider that other people naturally think differently (and not necessarily wrongly for that) because they dwell in different linguistically constructed worlds; and finally one must accept the inherent ontological and epistemological limits of one’s own language game.

Terwilliger’s interpretation of meaning is helpful here. He says, 

Meaning is a tendency to respond in a particular manner in a particular situation; and the more different tendencies to respond there are connected to a particular word, the more meaning it can be said to have.  (314) 

“Meaning” adds ambiguity to the significance of words. This may result in greater ontological, epistemological, and ethical anxiety, but it also results in greater freedom to enrich one’s life by broadening one’s understanding, experience, and perception of reality. Furthermore, it results in greater tolerance for and acceptance of others and frees people from the kind of personal, social, and institutional dogmatism that has too often led to the destruction of human life and other forms of being.

Rhetoric must teach students that today one must learn to live with a certain degree of ambiguity and uncertainty and that these attitudes are not evil but to be admired if they lead to tolerance of the views of other cultures and their language games even though they differ from one’s own. In fact, what has been wrong throughout his is the demand of unquestioned loyalty to one’s nation, political leaders, and religion. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

Bruner adds that culture consists of an “ambiguous text that is constantly in need of interpretation by those who participate in it...” Once this is understood, “Then” continues Bruner, “the constitutive role of language in creating social reality becomes a topic of practical concern” (122). The role of rhetoric in education is to make students aware of their rhetorical responsibility—which is not to be like the butler in Remains of the Day, but to construct their own reality and be responsible for understanding and accepting its implications for their world. Thus, ideally, learning is invention, not merely the consumption of data nor the acquisitions of skills, and certainly should not be a process of cultural indoctrination.

Bruner says, “The language of education, if it is to be an invitation to reflection and culture creating, cannot be the so-called uncontaminated language of fact and ‘objectivity.'  It must express stance and must invite counter-stance and in the process leave place for reflection, for metacognition” (129).

By showing students how reality is constructed, teachers reveal to them that reality is not set in stone and that present conceptions, perspectives, worlds, and paradigms may not be the most beneficial ways of understanding and seeing the world for humanity, the world, or themselves. By understanding that reality (as a set of notions and concepts) is socially created, students will begin to see the importance of the critical perspective, which is a perspective that requires that worldviews, attitudes, and even “facts” must meet certain standards of not only truth but goodness.

Knowing that our views of reality are constructed helps us understand why there are so many different views and makes us more tolerant of difference. In the modern world where local cultures are brought into the global exchange of ideas through various transportation and communication technologies, the acceptance of difference will be much more conducive to world peace than a continuation of ethnocentric attitudes.

Fin

This essay was taken from Frank Kyle's The Sun Also Rises and the Post-Narrative Condition. The extensive footnotes were removed to shorten the essay by half.

 

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Two Feminisms: Misandric Top of the Lake and Masculine 1883

Dedicated to Ukrainian Heroes

Preface

The Last of Us and the Masculine Hero

Before examining the two television series it will be useful to take a quick look at the two-part video game The Last of Us and The Last of Us 2. The game can be characterized as a futuristic western that takes place during an outbreak of a mutant Cordyceps fungus that ravages the United States, transforming its human hosts into bloodthirsty humanoid monsters. The two main characters are in The Last of Us are Joel and Ellie. Joel’s daughter Sarah is shot and dies in Joel’s arms. As the story continues he is given responsibility to protect Ellie who survived the infection and is to be sacrificed to make a serum against the fungus. His job is to protect her, but over time he grows attached to her resulting in his treating Ellie as an adopted daughter. The structure of the story is similar to the traditional western. Joel has the look of a cowboy and the two characters spend time on horseback.

The infected aren’t the only predators in the story. There are also men who are cannibals who would most likely eat Ellie after raping her. Joel is the typical masculine hero whose job it is to protect not only a female but a child in a world overrun by monsters of one kind or another—a world not so unlike ours, especially if one lives in a society in the thrall of masculine aggression such as Ukraine. Joel does his job—killing infected monsters, evil men who aren’t infected, and even the medical personnel who seek to sacrifice Ellie as Agamemnon scarified his daughter Iphigenia and as Abraham would have sacrificed his son Isaac on God’s say-so. Joel refuses to allow Ellie to be sacrificed for the greater good, even against Ellie’s wishes. It is his absolute commitment to her that makes him a hero to the fans of the game. The game has many similarities with 1883. Joel embodies characteristics of both James Dutton and Shea Brennan, and Ellie’s role in the story is similar to that of Elsa’s. 

The Last of Us 2 and Misandric Feminism

The sequel of the game is especially revealing because it shows what happened as a result of the game being infected with the ideology of misandric feminism. Just as Top of the Lake is the work of New Zealander feminist Jane Campion, The Last of Us 2 adopted the misandric feminism of Canadian-American Anita Sarkeesian, who influenced the game’s creator, writer, and director Israeli-American Neil Druckmann. Her influence was like giving Laszlo Toth a hammer with which to destroy Michelangelo’s Pietà. However, a golf club instead of a hammer is used. It’s wielded by Abby, an Amazonian woman who looks like she was created in a Cerberus laboratory in the video game Mass Effect 3. Her job as a representative of misandric feminism is to bash out the brains out of the conventional all-American masculine hero Joel while he lies on the floor tied and bound. The symbolism is blatant: misandric feminism seeks to destroy the American masculine hero.

At the end of The Last of Us 2 Ellie ends up alone and depressed in a world still filled with evil monsters and evil men, but with no one to love and protect her. Her hero is dead. The emotional motif of the first The Last of Us was love, just as love is the dominant motif of 1883. The emotional motif of The Last of Us 2 is hatred. I never played the sequel because doing so would be like repeatedly watching Laszlo Toth hammering away at Michelangelo’s Pietà. Instead I relied on game reviews such The Last of Us Part 2 Is Worse than You Think by Zaid Magenta and The Last of Us Part II - Angry Review by Angry Joe. Both are on YouTube and are extremely insightful and entertaining.

What is revealed by the two episodes of The Last of Us is that misandric feminism is simply another us-versus-them ideology of hatred. What is most interesting about The Last of Us 2 video game is that the viewer can see the negative transformational effect an ideology can have on a story or society. The tone and mindset of the second game is totally different from the first. And unlike Top of the Lake the second game doesn’t offer a hero or a workable solution for dealing with masculine evil. In Top of the Lake an evil man is killed by the story’s female hero. In The Last of Us 2 the hero is killed and the murderer is allowed to escape. Thus, The Last of Us 2 is as nihilistic as Grand Theft Auto games. Its negativity gives nothing to believe in, whereas the first game gives a realistic scenario for how to confront evil but more importantly a way of life infused with love that inspires protecting that which is most important in life represented by Ellie as it is represented by Elsa in 1883. She gives Joel’s life primordial meaning that is worth living and dying for. 

Top of the Lake: Misandric Feminism

The value of the New Zealand film is that it makes very clear what misandric feminism looks like. It is feminism inspired by a hatred of men. The lead character is Robin Griffin, a depressed and inept detective played by Elisabeth Moss who specializes in playing in misandric films such as Mad Men (more accurately titled as Bad Men) and The Handmaid's Tale about a dystopian society called Gilead that is dystopian because it’s run by men. Fair enough since all dystopian societies have been run by men; however, non-dystopian societies have also been run by men. Christopher John Hipkins, for example, is the prime minister of New Zealand, and New Zealand ranks among the top ten nations of the world for its quality of life. And Anita Sarkeesian’s Canada ranks 3rd by U.S News and Justin Trudeau  is the country’s Prime minister. No matter, ideologies—religious or secular—couldn’t care less about counter examples. In Gilead women “must submit to ritualized rape (referred to as ‘the ceremony’) by their male masters (‘Commanders’) in the presence of their wives” (“The Handmaid's Tale,” Wikipedia). That must send a chill through Mormons. I haven’t seen the series. Why would I want to watch a series in which women are repeatedly brutalized? Because I’m a man? Sorry, but not all men are misogynists. That probably comes as a big surprise to misandrists.

 In Top of the Lake there are three categories of evil men. The first and largest are the knuckle-draggers. These are brutes whose Stone Age DNA is impervious to humanizing cultures. (They do exist.) The second group is the police force which is made up of male pedophiles and rapists who target young girls or any other females. As cops they represent the idea that men are not to be trusted even when they wear uniforms that say they can be trusted. Then there are the miscellaneous male scumbags that look harmless or even pretend to be friends but will rape a woman who drops her guard because she is too trusting. Apparently that happened to Detective Robin Griffin, which would explain her chronic depression.

The focus of the story is Griffin’s investigation of a twelve-year-old girl who tries to commit suicide and later runs away into the forest. She had been repeatedly raped apparently as a victim of a pedophile ring run by cops. Young girls are drugged and offered as sex toys for a price, of course. (Such organizations do exist in the U.S. but they’re not run by cops, though they might be ignored by some cops for a price.) Nature is a better place than any place populated by men if only because nature, though harsh and even deadly, is honest. I recall 20 year old Cara Evelyn Knott who was raped and murdered by police officer Craig Alan Peyer, in San Diego, where I lived at the time. At the trial it came out that he had made predatory sexual advances on multiple female drivers. His uniform said “You can trust me.” But he couldn’t be trusted and used his uniform as a ruse for unsuspecting women. And who would they report Peyer to, the cops? Not the women. Still, one dirty cop doesn’t mean all cops are dirty.

However, the Top of the Lake logic of the misandric feminism is as follows:

All men are bad.

John, Joe, Bob, etc. are men.

Ergo, John, Joe, etc. are bad.

The fallacy of assuming all men are bad because some men are bad is called the fallacy of composition. The problem for women is that some bad men can give the impression that all men are bad or at the very least cannot be trusted. And the rape statistics for the U.S. is 16% of women have been victims of rape or attempted rape. In his book The Non-Suicidal Society Andrew Oldenquist argues that that an indication of societal breakdown is the increasing inability to predict the behavior of other members of the society toward oneself. In such a society a woman who finds herself among men may perceive all of them as potential threats. My own view is that women in the U.S. have to view men they do not know with cautious suspicion.

I sound as if I agree with the misandric feminism of Top of the Lake. I don’t. Misandric feminism is a categorical condemnation of all men. In the series, there is simply no room for good heterosexual men. The only two good men are a gay and a Māori. The male heterosexual European offspring are all bad. That is the view of New Zealand men presented by the series. What is puzzling is that New Zealand ranks 7^th in U.S. News and World Report’s “Best Countries for Women.”

Other countries are Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Australia, and Germany—all European. What makes these countries the best countries for women? The answer is complex, involving the legal and political systems and the culture. However, one reason has to be that the men of the countries want women to have the same rights and opportunity as they do and to be safe and happy. In Top of the Lake men are for the most part rotten and it is a woman cop who achieves justice. But in the real world women alone are incapable of creating best countries for women without the help of men. And there are many such countries in the world. Of course, a misandric feminist's utopia would be no male inhabitants, represented in the series by the Paradise cult.

Top of the Lake hardly offers inspiring women. There is the Paradise cult of women who live in railroad cars. They are damage merchandise who seek to separate themselves from the world. When the sun shines, they play nudist camp. The rest of the time they do group therapy led by a woman named GJ who calls the women on their delusions but has nothing else to offer. How could she when she, so it appears, has given up on life. They have no purpose in life beyond themselves, kind of like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine except they are all women. The detective seems as if she is on Prozac while pursuing her case. Visuals of her face suggest that she is chronically depressed. Other than her case, she doesn’t have a life. I don’t count as a having a life having occasional sex with a former boyfriend who apparently set her up to be raped. And her mother didn’t press charges against the men who raped her daughter, and being Catholic she force her daughter to give birth to the offspring of the man who raped her. Okay, she has good reason to be depressed. For women, religion is of no help at all. Most likely the woman would be condemned as a seductress. Watch The Magdalene Sisters, a compassionate film written and directed by a man Peter Mullan.

The tonality of the series is similar to film noir, dark and depressing without beautiful women and handsome men or a hero. Is the detective a hero or just wants revenge against those who raped her? Perhaps that doesn’t matter, but what does matter is that I expect movie heroes to be inspiring and the detective is anything but inspiring. She’s dreary like the entire series. What about rape victim Tui? She becomes feral creature living in the forest. She is a survivor, not a hero. Movie heroes should be inspiring.  Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley in Alien and Aliens is massively inspiring. In the the second film she is devoted to saving a young girl. She too is disillusioned by masculine evil in the form of corporate evil. Then there is Emily Blunt as a FBI agent in Sicario (also by Taylor Sheridan). She encounters masculine evil that ranks with the Xenomorphs Ripley has to contend with. And Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. These three characters/actresses are inspiring. I don’t fine Elisabeth Moss’s detective inspiring or even realistic. She has her moments. At times she looks silly wearing a gun too big for her. And the chronic frown doesn’t help. She is a depressed personality that is inconsistent with an inspiring hero. I’m certain that in real life are many heroes—male and female—who are depressed (dealing with evil people would be depressing), but we’re talking about movies. Watching Top of the Lake is like reading the obituaries. Hardly inspiring.

I see two problems with Top of the Lake that have to do with its misandric feminist ideology. First, the traditional source of meaning—boy meets girl, the two fall in love, marry, have children—is out of the question because a boy is involved. In addition, feminism sees marriage as a trap for women, a way for men to get free a live-in maid, cook, and sex toy. A good novel that explores the issue of domesticity being a trap for women is Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. In the novel Edna Pontellier wants to be an artist. In the story art—painting and music—offer a meaningful option to domesticity. In Top of the Lake the only option offered is to become a cop hunting down evil men. Its theme seems to be women are trapped by masculinity. Even the rescued Tui must face, as did cop Robin Griffin, giving birth to the child of the man who raped her.

Second, misandric feminism can’t allow male heroes. Their reasoning is based on the fact that many nation states in the world today are dystopias for women.  However, given the fact that men are not going to disappear, the proverb “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” seems relevant here. In Top of the Lake the female detective saves the day, which occurs occasionally in the real world—a female cop solves a crime, captures or kills a criminal, or saves a victim who is being assaulted. Generally, however, women alone cannot protect themselves against evil aggressors much less protect society from masculine evildoers. Misandric feminists can pretend that women don’t need men, but that’s just whistling past the graveyard, and actually Top of the Lake says as much. The women at Paradise huddle together like hens hiding from malicious masculine foxes.

1883: Masculine Feminism

Return to the Mythic Western

1883 is the return to the western genre that has been mocked and reviled by Hollywood. The movie makes clear that in a world where women are threatened by men women need masculine allies and actually most women welcome them. 1883 recognizes that constantly demonizing men as villains as Top of the Lake does is counterproductive for women, and perhaps even culturally unnatural. Yet, that is what contemporary radical feminism has been doing. And Hollywood has become the bullhorn for misandric feminism. For better or more likely for worse, the movie industry has had a transformational influence on American culture.

During its Golden Age Hollywood celebrated the masculine hero. The message to young men watching movies in a theater or on television was be heroes. Protect the vulnerable—women and children—from bad men. Western movies were at the forefront in sheer number. I grew up watching Bonanza, Wagon Train, Have Gun Will Travel, The Rifleman, and Wanted: Dead or Alive. There were also many movies with good men who didn’t carry guns. Then came the anti-westerns such as High Noon (nominated for seven Academy Awards) that depicts Americans as cowards (while American soldiers were fighting and dying in the Korean War), Blazing Saddles which mocks the western genre, and perhaps the most devastating to the genre Clint Eastwood’s westerns, in particular his America-hating Unforgiven, the message being America will not be forgiven. Hollywood awarded the movie with an Academy Award for best picture. That movie pretty much represents the end of not only western movies but the end of an American cultural art form that encouraged men to be heroes. I recognize that the western contained many flaws—stereotyping Native Americans, celebrating guns and violence, and distorting and sanitizing, if only by omission, American history.

Masculinity: Good and Evil

The theme of the mythic western is simple: evil men are a constant threat to society and good men are necessary to confront that threat. It is a theme expressed succinctly in the painting Oath of the Horatii by Jacques-Louis David:

The painting shows three brothers from a Roman family, the Horatii, who must fight three Curiatii to end the war between Rome and Alba Longa. The painting stresses the importance of patriotism and masculine self-sacrifice to protect one's country. And regardless that the legend that the painting is based on (which has a brother murdering his sister for being in love with one of the Curiatii), David’s painting is clearly about more than just patriotism. Like any true French artist, David revered women as illustrated in many of his paintings.

Sitting to the right are three women. The mother of the family comforts two children. Next to her are two women related by marriage weeping knowing that the outcome of the fight will be tragic. Clearly, for David the women represent what the men fight for. A nation without women and children is an empty husk not worth fighting for. The women are beautifully depicted and the presence of the two children illustrates women’s primordial importance as those who give and care for life. They also provide a community with romantic love and beauty. And without good men, they are vulnerable to male aggression.

At this very moment, Ukrainian fighters are not fighting for a piece of territory or the political idea of patria or fatherland or on the behalf of a dictator. They are fighting to protect their mothers, girlfriends, wives, and children who are the primordial lifeblood of a society. Without them a society has little value, really nothing profound worth fighting for. Fighting becomes simply an excuse for fighting—a barbarous masculine pastime. For moral, practical and aesthetic reasons women and children are worth defending. Defending the weak and vulnerable is morally praiseworthy. Attacking women and children and their homeland, as Russian troops are doing, is vile and morally evil.

The Moral Superiority of David’s Painting

Without women and children, men fight for the sake of fighting, which they enjoy doing because they are genetically programmed to be aggressive. The result, however, has been ongoing warfare. Judaism is a religious ideology that encourages and glorifies masculine aggression in God’s name, a motif that was passed on to its offspring Christianity and Islam. Territorial and cultural conquest characterizes all three religions. Masculine conflict justified by patriotism is mythical theme underlying the David’s painting. That is why the painting is morally superior to the militaristic, masculine legend it is based on. According to the legend only one of the Horatii brothers survives. He returns home to find his sister Camilla cursing Rome over the death of her Curiatius fiancé. Horrified to hear his beloved Rome being cursed, he draws his sword and kills his sister. The murder of Camilla illustrates how masculine patriotism that is devoted only to an idea rooted in masculinity (πατήρ (patḗr, “father”) is hollow and potentially immoral. The brother doesn't realize that without women Rome is an empty chauvinistic idea.

Putin and Nihilistic Masculinity

Putin’s declaration of war on Ukraine was motivated by nihilistic masculine aggression. The slaughter of men, women, and children and the destruction of Ukrainian society show that morality does not matter to Putin or to his followers. His war against Ukraine is an expression of his will to power driven by pure nihilistic masculine aggression, which involves a suspension of morality; aesthetic and altruistic values; and compassion, allowing masculine aggression to kill and destroy without restraint, justification, or guilt. In the U.S. bloody outburst of nihilistic masculine aggression often occurs in the form of mass shootings. Mass shootings and the invasion of Ukraine are similarly forms of masculine behavior. Invasions are often triggered by a single man who, in some way or another, is inflamed by his will to power and a hatred of others. Religion and political ambition often encourage hatred and have been used to justify what is in reality primordial masculine aggression that simply takes pleasure in doing harm—behavior illustrated by bandits in 1883.

André Bazin and the American Western

French film critic André Bazin characterizes the plot of the mythic Western as “epic Manicheism which sets the forces of evil over against the knights of the true cause” (“The Western,” in What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray, vol 2, 145). Bazin was perhaps the first film critic to take seriously the American western as an art form rather than just shoot-‘em-up entertainment. The American western emerged about the same time as American gangster movies, during the time of the Great Depression. Both remained popular, but only the western achieved the epic status in part due to directors such Raoul Walsh and John Ford. The American westward movement, the final historical epic event in human history, gave historical credence to the epic character of the mythic western film. After the conquest of the American west, new conquests could only be imagined to take place in science fiction. 1883 is based on history, not fantasy. The exception to that claim would be the Dust Bowl migrations depicted in John Ford’s epic masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath. However, though similar to movies like 1883, it doesn’t belong to the western genre, though I may be wrong about that.

The first epic based on a journey was the Mesopotamian The Epic of Gilgamesh, followed by Homer’s Odyssey. But unlike the events of those two poems, the American westward movement was a historical epic; thus, epic status came naturally to western stories about wagon train journeys. Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail was the first and perhaps the best until 1883, which is significant because the transition from the male protagonist (John Wayne’s character Breck Coleman) to the female as the central protagonist (Isabel May’s Elsa Dutton) involved a leap over a thousand western movies. What makes the American western epic unique other than being based on recent events is that it is about the heroic struggle of ordinary men and women, not larger than life Homeric and Arthurian superheroes.

Bazin’s characterizing the conflict of the western as Manichean is of interest. Three religious ideologies that see the world as involved in a supernatural cosmic conflict between the forces of good and the forces of evil are Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Judeo-Christianity. That view of reality continues to remain popular among Christians who believe the forces of Satan are at war with the forces of Christ.  It was the other two religions  along with us-versus-them Judaism that caused Christianity to adopt the “us-versus-them” cosmic war scenario.

The two founders of Christianity are Apostle Paul and Augustine of Hippo. The latter had been a Manichean before converting to Christianity, and his Manichean thinking—along with Paul’s war of the spirit against matter/flesh—greatly influenced negativity of Christianity. Historian Charles Freeman says in The Closing of the Western Mind, “It was Augustine who developed a rationale of persecution” (295) and that “Augustine’s rationale for persecution was to be used to justify slaughter (as of the Cathars or the native people of America” (Freeman 299). Except for his mother, Augustine was also a woman hater, most likely an attitude he adopted from his mentor Apostle Paul. Thus, after becoming a Christian he sent away the mother of his son. Manicheaism also found its way into Marxism with the global conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

Bazin believes that the best western movies capture the mythic conflict (with and without the religious context), and they are unique for doing so with a popular genre. Good versus evil is a central theme in the ever popular gangster movies and in film noir crime stories. However, these two popular genres never achieved mythic status, and the reason for that, I believe, is location. Crime movies take place in the confines of cities, whereas westerns take place in the great outdoors, the “immense stretches of prairie, of deserts, of rocks to which the little wooden town clings precariously (a primitive amoeba of civilization)” (Bazin 145). To know what Bazin means, one must visit Monument Valley:

Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail included locations such as the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and the giant redwoods.

Atomized people swirl about like atoms in cities, and the conflict between good and evil isn’t cosmic but one involving criminals, victims, and cops. There is no journey or quest. The series Naked City open with this line: “There are eight million stories in the naked city.” Lots of little stories but no big story. A city like New York City has mythic proportions but its stories do not. To be fair, the best crime stories do emphasize the larger than life presence of the city, but the characters themselves are not involved in a mythic conflict, perhaps because there is no goal beyond survival. Another important difference between big-city crime stories and the western is the preponderance of people in the big-city and the comparative absence of nature—landscapes; lakes, rivers, and streams; arching sky; and plants and animals. In a sense, cities are prisons that cut their inhabitants off from nature. The natural environment—in particular wilderness—has a mythic character without the need of narrative. Nature has mythic presence. Naturalists such as Edward Abbey and Ansel Adams recognized nature’s mythic character. So does Elsa.

John Ford gave his western movies mythic proportions by emphasizing their location in a natural setting of immense expanse and by doing so creating the mythic western. His favorite setting was Monument Valley. It is the setting that gives the human struggle mythic dimensions. Stagecoach was the first movie to fully realize the southwest setting to give western stories mythic depth. It too is a journey story, not by covered wagons but by stagecoach. What is amazing is that it’s a ninety-six minute movie that achieves the grandeur of an epic. At first, it appears to be a conventional shoot em-up western, but it’s not. The characterization is complex, but what resonates most with the viewers is the setting, especially given most viewers would have been at the time city dwellers. Its mythic character is found in the simplicity of the story’s structure: a small group of ordinary travelers from different walks of life, each with his or her personal story and destination, are thrown inharmoniously together in a shared journey that becomes a struggle of survival as they travel in the small stagecoach across the wide-open spaces of an endless desert. Nature looms large in the story—more so than any other aspect of the story.

What Bazin Gets Wrong

Bazin missteps when he says,

“The (1) Indian, who lived in this world, was incapable of imposing on it man’s order. He mastered it only by identifying himself with its (2) pagan savagery. The (3) white Christian on the contrary is truly the conqueror of the new world. (4) The grass sprouts where his horse has passed. He imposes (5) simultaneously his moral and his technical order, the one linked to the other and the former guaranteeing the latter. The physical safety of the stagecoaches, the protection given by the federal troops, the building of the great railroads are less important perhaps than the (6) establishment of justice and respect for law” (145). 

What Bazin gets right historically is that the Christians conquered the new world with guns, germs, and steel. He uses the word “conquered” as if the conquest was a good thing. For white Christians it was. For the Indians it was a disaster. And ditto that for South America and Canada. Number (4) implies that nature rejoiced in response to the invasion. Tim Flannery’s The Eternal Frontier offers a different view, describing deforestation, the shooting into extinction passenger pigeons, the population of which was 3 billion to 5 billion, and the shooting almost into extinction the bison, with 30-60 million bison reduced to about 675. That’s a lot of killing. And the killers were all men.

Trees were also hit hard by pioneers. Less than 4% America’s original forests remain in existence, most in protected public lands. That’s a lot of cutting. So, I don’t think nature rejoiced at the arrival of the Christian conquerors, who showed no restraint in their conquest of nature because the Book of Genesis told them that nature was given to them as a commodity, not as an object of reverence which only God deserved: “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground’” (1:28). And they did just that. Of course, the decimation of the native people was included in the conquest. They belonged to nature, not to God, and would be treated as such. Like the ancient forests they too live on reservations protected by the U.S. government.

(3) Thus, Bazin is correct when he says, “The white Christian on the contrary is truly the conqueror of the new world.” Here comes the irony, offered by another wagon-train story How the West Was Won. The French title is less euphemistic: La Conquête de l'Ouest. Bazin calls such westerns “superwesterns.” I call them Cadillac westerns—bloated with mega-famous movie stars. It’s disappointing to see that John Ford, inventor of the lean mythic western, took part in the project. But Hollywood has the Midas touch. The irony comes at the end with the film with an epilogue narrated by Spencer Tracy that shows how modern America grew away from that vision of creating a bucolic paradise with images of Hoover Dam, a four-level downtown freeway cloverleaf interchange in Los Angeles, and the Golden Gate Bridge. The hoped for pastoral paradise became the technological nightmare depicted in Godfrey Reggio Koyaanisqatsi.

“The (1) Indian, who lived in this world, was incapable of imposing on it man’s order. He mastered it only by identifying himself with its (2) pagan savagery.” The wisdom of the Native Americans was learning how to live in harmony with nature. Nature is primordial reality, and as Leonard Susskind points out, humans mess with nature at their peril. The Indian world might have endure a few more thousand years had the white man not showed up with his advance technology—in particular guns—and unlimited religion-fueled hubris. It’s problematic that modern civilization will finish the present century without being disrupted by nuclear warfare or a catastrophic climatic shift.

Apparently, Bazin knew little to nothing about the way of life of Native American pagans. Their goal was never to impose man’s order on nature. That concept would have been foreign to them. Their goal was to live in harmony with nature, which they believed they were a part. It was not until reason became a tool of masculine aggression did the assaulted on nature occur in earnest. The mastermind was Francis Bacon. He rationalized the Genesis project of subduing nature. According to Carolyn Merchant, Bacon saw nature as feminine, adding another justification for the assault. She says, “Due to the Fall from the Garden of Eden (caused by the temptation of a woman), the human race lost its ‘dominion over creation.’” The idea here is that nature became like Eve—inherently unruly. Thus, says Bacon, “she [nature] is [to be] put in constraint, molded, and made as it were new by art and the hand of man; as in things artificial.” To quote Merchant, “’By art and the hand of man,’ nature can then be ‘forced out of her natural state and squeezed and molded.’ In this way, ‘human knowledge and human power meet as one’” (The Death of Nature, 170).

More accurately, masculine reason and power become one and impose themselves on nature in a manner justified by God. Only a God that is supernatural (existing outside of nature) could command that nature to be subdued. The pagans—demonized by the masculine minds of the Abrahamic religions—worshiped deities inherent within nature; thus any attempt to subdue nature would be an affront to the gods and would result in tragedy for humans. The Hopi word Koyaanisqatsi means life out of balance. I believe that is an accurate description of the modern world. Today’s world is not totally out of balance but is moving in that direction. Unlike the ancient peoples, technological man has the power throw the world way out of balance.

This is actually suggested in 1883 with its references to the Civil War which killed over a half million Americans. The killing took four years. Today, a nuclear bomb can kill that many in a matter of minutes. Masculine aggression existed among Native Americans, but their weapons killed each other one at a time, not thousands in the blink of an eye. Two archaic a-bombs killed a hundred thousand Japanese in minutes. (MIRVs are missiles that can carry up to 10 nuclear warheads! That’s progress?) An estimated total of 70–85 million people perished in World War II, about 3% of the 2.3 billion people on Earth in 1940. Both the atomic bomb and the war reflect modern man’s ability to create life-destroying disorder. Also, of interest is that the human population went from 2.3 billion people in 1940 to 7.8 billion people today. I don’t see that as an indicator that world is moving toward a more orderly state. As the Native Americans discovered in 1883 more people can result in an increase in disorder. Big cities seem to indicate that as well. In 1883 Fort Worth is a dangerous city full of dangerous men. Today, the city’s crime rate is 40% higher than the country’s average. Americans completed the conquest of the west just seven years later (1890), and look at the country now—a paradise only when compared with secular and religious totalitarian states. About two million jailers, detectives, security guards, and cops are needed to keep order. And still 16,425 people were murdered in the country in 2019. That's more than double the number of United States troops who died fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, about 7,000.

Thus, Bazin’s complaint about pagan savagery rings a hollow as does his claim (5) that the white Christian “imposes simultaneously his moral and his technical order, the one linked to the other and the former guaranteeing the latter.” The two World Wars, the Vietnam War, the Iraq war, and the Russia war against Ukraine are just a few of the more recent examples that prove white Christian nations are quite capable of immoral, savage behavior. And it started 1,700 years ago with the first Christian Roman emperor Constantine I. Here is how Ramsay MacMullen describes the man so beloved by Christians: “The empire had never had on the throne a man given to such bloodthirsty violence as Constantine” (Christianizing the Roman Empire: A.D. 100-400, 50). The Abrahamic religions are notable for their ability to exacerbate masculine aggression simply by divinely justifying aggression. Of course, the masculine will to power plays a central role in all three religions. The epiphanic irony of Judaism is that Yahweh “himself” illustrates the masculine will to power.

In the context of the feminism of both Top of the Lake and 1883, this carnage indicates that men are the problem. Yet, they are also the only realistic solution to the problem, which Top of the Lake ignores and 1883 recognizes. However, we know that good men fighting bad men is only a stop-gap solution. The best solution for everyone would be for all men to control their propensity for violence. And both series seem to conclude that solution is wishful thinking given masculinity’s incorrigible aggressiveness. However, 1883 does suggest that the best solution resides with women—though it can be realized only by good men. Women will have to inspire men to recognize that what women represent is humanity’s primordial value—a celebration of life and nature rather than violence, death, and destruction. Women such as Elsa Dutton (and others) are able to inspire good men to protect women, children, and community from bad men. However, if masculine aggression is an absolute as both series imply, it is problematic and perhaps wishful thinking to believe that bad men can ever be inspired to be good men.

There have been many cultures that considered women, children, and community the primary value of human existence because they are the primordial values of existence. God is an invented value, abstract and otherworldly in the sense that unicorns and mermaids are otherworldly. They are simply not a part of Earthy life in the way nature’s creatures are. In addition, all the Abrahamic religions introduced a demonization of women that did not exist among the ancient Greeks and Native Americans. Those religions corrupted the cultures  of the ancient Greeks and Native Americans that respected women and by doing so protected women against masculine aggression. Yes, the lack of respect leads to aggression toward women.

Women Among the Greeks

C.M. Bowra says in The Greek Experience that “Women had their own sphere, and men had theirs.” Yet, “women move freely and easily among men.... Greek women and girls took a lively part in local ceremonies and made their contribution to songs and dances” (38-39).

Women among Native Americans

Here is an illustration. Howard Russell says the following about the treatment of women by the Abenaki Indians of the Northeastern Woodlands of Canada and the United States: “As a person, a woman was the unquestioned mistress of her body.... Violation of the chastity of unconsenting girls is said to have been unknown, as was rape or abuse of a married woman. Incest incurred disgrace.... Though usually permanent, marriage was by no means indissoluble. A husband could put away his wife, or, as was more likely, a wife who felt put upon by a mean husband could leave, taking her children, if any, and go to another tribe. They were never unwelcome, says Winslow [Edward, governor of Plymouth colony], ‘for where most women are is most plenty’: it was they who did not only the cooking and planting, but the tanning, basket-making, and weaving” (Indian New England before the Mayflower, 97-98). Also, “Rape of an English woman by an Indian was never recorded” (43).

Luther Standing Bear says, “The woman of the household had no ‘lord and master’ when it came to deciding where she and her children were to live.... The furnishings of the tipi home were all the handiwork of the women. Women and children were the objects of care among the Lakotas.... A man’s family was his first thought” (Land of the Spotted Eagle 83 & 91).

About the treatment of children Vernon Kinietz says about the Huron in The Indians of the Great Lakes: 1615-1760 that “Punishment of no kind seems to have been used, the children growing up in complete liberty. This condition and the resulting small show of respect for their parents shocked Sagard [Gabriel, a missionary], Champlain, and others” (92).

The same is illustrated in Deloria’s Waterlily. So, what did Native American societies have and didn’t have that created a culture in which women and children were safe from masculine predation (except during warfare), which is not the case for many so-called civilized societies as indicated by both Top of the Lake and 1883? First of all, though Native American children’s showing “small respect for their parents” does not mean they didn’t respect their parents and other members of the tribe. It means that they were unruly as children often are. They learned to respect (have admiration for) their parents and other members of the tribe by observing them. This kind of relationship between parents and children is clearly illustrated by independent-minded Elsa’s relationship with her parents and other adults such as Shea Brennan and Thomas.

Second, Native American cultures did not encourage children to disrespect their parents and other adults, as Hollywood-dominated American culture has been doing for decades. On the other hand, American adults encouraged being disrespected as illustrated by white adults’ treatment of blacks in the South during the Civil Rights movement and by the idiocy of white politicians (Kennedy, Johnson, et al.) who sanctioned the Vietnam War, drafting 58,220 young American men of all colors to their deaths and killing a million or more Vietnamese men, women, and children. Here is an image of a Vietnamese child severely burned by napalm:

So, at the time, any young person could justifiably ask “What’s to respect?” And by the way, the war was more about clashing masculine ideologies—Christianity versus Marxism—than about people, American or Vietnamese.

Native American cultures were culturally and morally far more restrained toward other people and nature than American culture has ever been. Rules of behavior came from the culture itself and the people, not from an authoritarian book or authoritarian males, such as Texas judge William Adams’ who alludes to the Bible as he viciously beats his disabled 16-year-old daughter, Hallie. One reference was to Paul’s Ephesians 6:1: “Children, obey your parents as in the Lord.” The judge was simply following the advice of Proverbs 13:24: “Those who spare the rod of discipline hate their children.” (The video is available online.)

This is an excellent example of how the Bible can be used to condone violence by transforming cruel and vicious acts into an expression of love. Abraham would have sacrificed his son Isaac out of love for God. And let’s not overlook the Bible’s sentencing to death homosexuals: “they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them”(Leviticus 20:13). Thus, it’s okay to kill homosexuals because God says it’s okay. And in Texas Adams did no wrong because “The Texas Penal Code states [with biblical consistency] that the use of non-deadly force against a child is justified if the person using force: Is the child's parent or stepparent,” etc. Native Americans were without the Judeo-Christian Bible that condemns women as inherently sinful and says that use of violence is acceptable if God gives permission as “he” gave LBJ and George W. Bush permission to go to war.

This is how religion leads do moral nihilism by having God-centered ethics overrule human-centered ethics. Of course, men are the ones who decide what are God's ethics. However, even if God “himself” condemned to death homosexuals doesn't mean the condemnation is ethical. God's flooding the world and destroying cities were immoral actions. When God is placed above human morality, morality becomes nihilistic because any action can be justified by claiming God condoned it—such as the extermination of pagans, members of other religions or no religion, and heretics like Jesus.

Masculine aggression was still present but directed toward enemy tribes and animals that needed to be killed for food. What was most importantly absent from Native American tribes was a hate-filled deity that created enemies where none existed before. Women are condemned from the very beginning of the Bible with the condemnation and punishment of Eve—a negative view of women that that would continue with all the Abrahamic religions, but truly reaching an apex with pinnacle with Apostle Paul. This hated of women illustrated by the murder of pagan philosopher Hypatia by a mob of Christian men. She was, according the Abrahamic religions thrice damned: first as a pagan, second as a woman, and third as an educated woman who was infinitely more intelligent (as a philosopher, scientist, and pagan) than the men who murdered her.

Native Americans had enemies, but no enemies created by an ideology. There was no condemnation of people as infidels or heretics for what they believed or did not believe. Ramsay MacMullen and Catherine Nixey tell us in Christianizing the Roman Empire and The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, respectively, how Christian religious ideology tore the empire apart. The titles are misleading. The conflict was between Roman citizens, those who converted to the Christian religious ideology and those who wanted to remain pagan until they were forced to either convert or die.

Christianized Roman pagans simply did what Jesus wanted them to do: “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household” (Matthew 10:35-36). Family and tribal members turning against one another was unheard of among the Native Americans. The Greek city states fought one another but not over ideology. In her book The Greek Way Edith Hamilton says that in Greece there was no dominating church or creed. She said religious persecution was so slight in Greece that it would not have been considered had Socrates not been its last victim (175 & 181). Ditto that for Native Americans. Another kudos for Native Americans is that they possessed no slaves, whereas the Bible condones slavery. Runaway slaves were adopted into Native American tribes. In 1883 Christian (I assume) Elsa becomes betrothed to Sam, a Comanche, a pagan warrior.

I believe the best of all possible worlds for women and children can be created from elements of ancient Greek and Native American cultures—both pagan. One big obstacle is the popularity of the religions that hate pagans, infidels, and heretics and condemn women as inherent sirens of corruption. The origin of this notion is Eve’s so-called corruption of her boyfriend Adam because she didn’t want to hang out with a dummy. The ancient Greeks and Native Americans offer cultural elements out of which a civilized society in which women and children are safe and respected can be constructed. A society that doesn’t respect women and children and endangers them is at best less than civilized, at worst barbaric.

There are two obstacle that to creating a civilized society—the origin of both being masculinity. The first are the masculine knuckle draggers that appear in both series. The society itself may not be the problem but an abundance of men who act as predators toward women and children. If a society falls under their influence, it becomes criminalized beyond the salvation of good men. How should such men be dealt with? Both Top of the Lake and 1883 suggest termination. According to Immanuel Kant’s foundational moral principle of autonomy, the lives of people should not be interfered with unless those people violate the principle—by aggressing women or children. If they do, their moral right to autonomy is rescinded.

However, if the obstacle is an ideology that defines the culture, then the civilizing process encounters an insurmountable obstacle. The idiocy of George W. Bush’s nation building project show showed that much. The problem here is that aggression breeds aggression in its most destructive form—war. The U.S. has tended to use war as a political tool to get what it wants. Wars consist of invaders and defenders; the actions of the former are immoral and the actions of the latter are moral. Simply illustrated: invading a home is immoral; defending one’s home is moral. And, of course, the men who invade are immoral and the men who defend are moral. Also, helping a neighbor to defend his home is moral in the Good Samaritan sense (altruistic), as in the case of helping Ukraine defend itself against invading Russians.

Thus, the best responses to nations that are defined by inhumane ideologies do not include aggression except to defend one’s own nation and other humane nations against aggression. Having friends is essential to surviving in a world constantly threatened by masculine aggression. The first response is to isolate evil nations. One justification for this is moral—again Kant’s principle of autonomy. The other is practical. Nations that are evil because they have succumbed to some form of aggressive-oppressive masculinity must be tolerated not because they are good but because interference in the form of aggression could very well end up being evil.

The Two Bush Wars

A quick look at the two Bush wars is enlightening. George H. W. Bush’s Gulf War was moral because it was defensive, defending Kuwait against Iraqi aggression. His error was not having Saddam Hussein hauled before the World Court and charged with a crime against humanity. That wisdom would have avoided his demented son’s war and earned the gratitude of the Kurds and most of the Iraqi people. On the other hand, George W. Bush’s Iraq War was not defensive but invasive thus immoral. Iraq was one of those state brutally ruled by oppressive masculinity justified by a religious ideology. 460,000 deaths resulted from Dubya’s war—including women and children killed—and earned the wrath of the Iraqi people. Let’s call that an immoral Pyrrhic victory: a war that claims to be moral but is in fact immoral—win or lose. In the case of the Iraq War, George W. Bush should have been hauled before the World Court and charged with a crime against humanity.

The unfortunate lesson here is that some evil nations must be tolerated as long as their evil remains within the nation’s borders. Attempting to save the nation from itself could very well result in a greater evil being committed by the so-called liberating nation. However, a response that does not involve invasion and war is isolation. Civilized nations should shun uncivilized nations as much as possible. However, greed and humanitarian fanciful thinking often results in benefiting thus empowering evil aggressive nations—such as Russia and China. China hasn’t invaded Taiwan yet, but most likely will in the future because that is what masculine aggression--unrestrained by morality—does. Thus, the only reasonable and moral response to nations ruled by oppressive masculinity is isolation and preparation, with the hope that change will come from within. Which might be wishful thinking given aggressive masculinity seems as absolute as gravity. It is interesting that both the Russian and Chinese revolutions simply replaced one masculine authoritarian government with another. Ditto that for the overthrow of the communist regime of the USSR. After the demise of Stalin the communist regime seemed almost civilized compared to the mad man now in control of the country.

Minds that Refuse to Be Liberated

There is another problem that occurs when a nation’s oppressive masculinity is rooted in an aggressive masculine  ideology. Richard Dawkins addresses this problem in an essay titled “Viruses of the Mind.” His thinking is that the human mind is similar to that of a computer or robot. It can be reconfigured in the way software programs program computers and robots. Ideologies are the software used on humans. He says “native Chinese minds differ dramatically from native French minds, and literate minds differ from illiterate minds.” Cultures program the minds of their inhabitants. Programmed minds are very resistant to new ideas thus resistant to being liberated, which means taking the red pill in order to think outside the ideological box. The minds of illiterate knuckle draggers are also resistant to new ideas because the minds that are most open to new ideas are educated minds, what I would call philosophical minds that look at the world critically rather than gullibly. Masculine ideologies also tend to claim that men should rule over women, and an elite group of men—ideologues—should rule over everyone one else. In a society of minds programmed by a masculine ideology, even women adhere to the ideology that oppresses them because their minds have been programmed to accept the “truth” of the ideology that justifies their oppression.

Elsa’s Wisdom

Is illustrated by her actions, not her ideas. She is not philosophical in the way Shea is. Her wisdom is intuitive, rooted in her femininity. It is wisdom that the ancient Greeks sought in idea of eudaimonia, or the good life. There isn’t a single answer to what is the good life because it can be interpreted from various perspectives. To men who enjoy dong harm, the good life consists in doing harm. Convincing them otherwise is most likely impossible because their propensity to harm is hardwired in them either biologically or ideologically. To morally good men and women part of the good life is refraining from doing harm except to protect themselves and other people from being harmed. Certainly, one can claim that the life of the Good Samaritan is good morally in so far as it benefits others. This is the life of the altruists. Both the detective Robin Griffin and Jamie in Top of the Lake are morally good altruists. Simply living as an altruist can be considered achieving eudaimonia. In 1883 many characters live altruistically—living unselfishly for others. It may come as a surprise, but Jesus doesn’t achieve Good Samaritan status. He lives primarily for himself and helps other only to promote his religious agenda: : “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).

In addition to the good life of the altruists, Elsa offers another insight into what makes up the good life. And her wisdom is as simple as it is profound and true. People don’t need ideologies—religious or secular—to tell them what the good life consists of. First of all, ideologies are untrue, rooted in the masculine imagination rather than in life experience. They are also artificial, based on invented ideas rather than on Earth-world experience. Finally, ideologies create the opposite of the good life by causing unnecessary harm, such as creating enemies where none existed before and by creating oppressive totalitarian societies in which the government does not allow citizens to think for themselves or to pursue self-realization as they see fit. This is especially true of religions that subordinate status women to that of men.

In 1883 we watch Elsa struggle to live the life she wants for herself against conventional demands represented by her mother and her aunt, Claire Dutton. In part, the wide-open spaces (being away from the restraints of social convention) not only allow her the freedom to realize her life as she wants but offer her options rooted in the organic world of nature. Thus her self-realization has primordial depth that it would not have in a society defined by an artificial ideology. To a certain degree that goes as well for men. William Blake sums up the natural life contra the artificial life in the poem “The School Boy”:

 I love to rise in a summer morn,

When the birds sing on every tree;

The distant huntsman winds his horn,

And the skylark sings with me:

O what sweet company!

But to go to school in a summer morn, -

O it drives all joy away!

Under a cruel eye outworn,

The little ones spend the day

In sighing and dismay.

Ah then at times I drooping sit,

And spend many an anxious hour;

Nor in my book can I take delight,

Nor sit in learning's bower,

Worn through with the dreary shower.

How can the bird that is born for joy [freedom]

Sit in a cage and sing?

How can a child, when fears annoy,

But droop his tender wing,

And forget his youthful spring!

O father and mother if buds are nipped,

And blossoms blown away;

And if the tender plants are stripped

Of their joy in the springing day,

By sorrow and care's dismay, -

How shall the summer arise in joy,

Or the summer fruits appear?

Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,

Or bless the mellowing year,

When the blasts of winter appear? 

Like Elsa, the school boy finds nature sweet company. Why? Because nature is his primordial origin and doesn’t impose artificial restraints on his life. He wants to be in nature for the same reason people go camping and hiking in nature—to get away from the structure society imposes on its members. It is also a return to the primordial world, the mysterious and enchanting Earth-world that gave birth to mountains, valleys, deserts, plains, rivers, lakes, oceans, rain, clouds, wind, snow, and all the creatures we share Earth with. Nature is our primordial home. In Top of the Lake 12-year-old Tui finds safety in nature away from masculine predators. It is also a place of freedom and openness rather than the organized, confining space of a city or a school room. Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi shows the transition from the primordial natural space and time to the artificially created space and time in which life becomes externally regulated. According to Koyaanisqatsi the city is a grid-like structure similar to a computer chip that totally organizes life.

In western movies the open spaces of nature are associated with freedom. This mental and physical space is celebrated by the scenes of Elsa riding her horse. The desire for greater freedom is represented by the German immigrants in 1883. Of course, greater freedom comes with risks. Space and time are rationally organized for the purposes of productivity and safety. Bridges are built so rivers can be safely crossed. Outlaws seek to escape the law and order associated with a civil society. Society is a process of using reason to organize time and space and people so that they are more easily managed and less threatening.

But as Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi shows, unbridled rationalization of space and time produces the technological city that can harm people in other ways. A topic addressed by Robert Wright in his Time magazine article “20^th Century Blues.” The problem is illustrated in 1883 by the city of Fort Worth where Elsa almost gets raped. So it seems the pastoral paradise of the story is ever elusive. And the town and country divide has some relevance to feminism if one considers the city to be the product of masculine reason seeking to control time and space whereas the time and space of nature is considered feminine, occurring naturally. Watch Koyaanisqatsi with attention to reason’s geometrical transformation of space and its quantitative compression of time.

In “The School Boy” the school house can represent the city, the teacher government and bureaucracy, the books and learning social conditioning or indoctrination in extreme cases. What the school boy wants is what Elsa briefly achieves and would have had for a lifetime had violent masculinity not taken her life. Returning to Elsa’s simple wisdom about eudaimonia or the good life: Being the in world and love are all that are needed.

Elsa, Shea, and Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer

In his The Spirit of Modern Philosophy Josiah Royce says about Schopenhauer that his “pessimism is actually expressive of a very deep insight into life” (229). Schopenhauer’s view of reality is that it is the product of an irrational cosmic Will that produced and infuses everything in the universe. He was inspired by Kant’s noumenon, the ultimate reality behind the phenomenal world that we live in. It is believed that ultimate reality is nothing like the reality of time and space that people live in that seems so rational in its design—at least as seen on Earth before the age of telescopes.

Facing Facts: Galileo and Copernicus

Galileo Galilei’s use of the telescope is informative here. According to Aristotelian principles the Moon exists in the heavens above the imperfections of the sublunary sphere; hence it should be perfect, a view accepted by the Catholic Church. Galileo found, to the contrary, that the surface of the moon is neither smooth nor perfectly spherical. It is uneven, rough, and crowded with depressions and bulges. Galileo discovered that the world was less perfect than Judeo-Christians would have us believe being God’s handiwork. Before Galileo, Nicolaus Copernicus theorized that the Sun is at the center of the solar system (heliocentrism). Galileo supported Copernicus’ theory and was prosecuted for doing so. The Church didn’t like the idea that humans were not at the center of the Universe since God made the Universe for them. The two discoveries were cracks in the anthropocentric view of the Universe expressed by the Abrahamic religions—that the all of the Universe is all about humanity.

Kant’s philosophy suggested that ultimate reality (the noumenon) was completely alien—beyond our comprehension, more so than the Christian God, which is a ghostly humanoid, but because the human mind is not designed to comprehend absolute chaos or absolute irrationality. Kant’s philosophy along with everyday experience caused Schopenhauer to develop his pessimistic philosophy that understands the world we live in to be the product of blind, irrational Will. In Royce’s words, it is a terrifying view: “that life is through and through tragic and evil.” Elsa discovers that as we should have by now. And both Schopenhauer and Royce didn’t believe that the tragic truth should be annulled by creating an alternate divine reality that explains the imperfections of life as the result of a mischievous waif in the Garden of Eden. And the solution to Schopenhauer’s problem, says Royce, “surely cannot lie in any romantic dream of a pure and innocent world far off somewhere, in the future, in heaven or the isles of the blessed” (232). That is the reality Elsa encounters and must come to grips with.

Royce’s response to Schopenhauer’s pessimism and the reality that inspired it is relevant to masculine feminism—though no feminist himself: “I think that the best man is the one who can see the truth of pessimism, can absorb and transcend that truth, and can be nevertheless an optimist, not by virtue of his failure to recognize the evil of life, but by virtue of his readiness to take part in the the struggle against this evil.... If these men are brave men, their sense of the evil that hinders our human life will some day arouse them to fight this evil in dead earnest...” (231). Important here is the role that Royce sets out for men, illustrated in 1883. The series makes pretty clear that evil is an inherent problem that humans must face. This evil is natural, not supernatural. If it were supernatural in the form of Satan and his bad boys, then why would God allow it, as he allowed Eve to be conned by wily Satan? Why does God allow bad boy Satan to exist? Being invincible to pain, injury, and death, why doesn’t “he” do what good men do who are not invincible to pain, injury, and death—fight evil? The answer is actually pretty simple. God is an invented ghost in the machine.

The good brave men that are needed are men like the good men in 1883. There are, however, two types of evil. The first is natural evil that comes in endless forms from nature, which is as Galileo and Schopenhauer reveal and Elsa discovers, far from perfect. Natural evil is “anything that causes injury, anything that harms or is likely to harm.” But this evil is not immoral or wicked because it lacks the intent to harm. That describes the other form of evil—men who knowingly seek to cause harm. Such men are the greatest and most disgusting threat to humanity. In a sense, their evil is natural because it is rooted in their biological DNA, to which they choose to be slaves. That DNA exists in good men as well, but they choose not to live as slaves of their DNA but as Good Samaritans, that is, they choose to liberate themselves from their bestial tendencies by choosing to live morally. Thus, morality—in this sense—is a form of freedom.

What Schopenhauer Gets Wrong

First, his notion that the Will permeates the Universe in soul-like fashion is false. The Will is simply another among many metaphysical religious-philosophical fantasies. It is no less supernatural than the God of the Abrahamic religions. And it’s really not inherently evil in the sense of seeking to harm. Schopenhauer saw reality as ever striving, ever changing, ever in motion but blindly so. The striving part exists only in organisms, so he commits a double fallacy of analogy and composition. He sees the striving behavior of organisms and in himself and projects that striving on the Universe as a whole. He commits the fallacy of composition by assuming that the behavior of a part of reality reflects the behavior of all of reality—the Universe. However, Schopenhauer was right to consider the creativity of the Universe to be an irrational process. The Universe’s striving was to him blind, without purpose or a goal, without telos, to use the Greek word for an ultimate purpose or end. Actually, striving without purpose or end is a contradiction. Striving implies an end sought after. Modern science agrees with Schopenhauer in so far as it claim the evolution of the Universe has been a haphazard, purposeless process, though one that had nothing to do with a ghostly Will driving the process.

Second, Schopenhauer's solution to counteract the cosmic Will was for humanity to adopt an attitude of resignation and passivity. He got the idea from the Orient—Hinduism and Buddhism. Both are life-denying religions that focus on the afterlife. Essentially, it is the solution of the Lotus-Eaters in Homer’s Odyssey or Timothy Leary’s solution “drop out and tune in with drugs” adopted by hippies. A person waves the white flag to life by dropping out. Shakespeare puts the choice this way: “To be or not to be? Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them…” (act 3, scene 1 Hamlet). To passively suffer the slings and arrows of life is Schopenhauer’s selfish, ignoble choice. “To take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them” is Royce’s choice and the choice of the heroes of Top of the Lake and 1883.

Shea

The importance of Shea is that he and his sidekick Thomas won’t stand by passively while the slings and arrows of evil men assault innocent people. Both were soldiers who fought to end slavery and Pinkerton agents who fought outlaws. What is most interesting about Shea is his clear recognition of the many hazards of life and as a kind of wise Odysseus gets people who are unrealistic optimists or just naive to recognize that the world is a very dangerous place that requires people to live rationally and prudently. He is a benevolent taskmaster who takes a parental attitude toward the settlers. Thomas’ role is humanitarian. He serves as a buffer between the easily angered Shea and the settlers.

Elsa

In 1883 Elsa discovers unpleasant facts of life: that the world is not all about humans, that nature is dangerous to those who fail to respect her, and finally evil men are a constant threat especially to women. At the beginning of the series her approach to life seems pollyannaish but then she has a Schopenhauerian epiphany when evil men kill her cousin Mary Abel and some immigrants, causing her aunt Claire Dutton to commit suicide. She becomes momentarily a Schopenhauerian pessimist, which I believe becomes most severe during the fatal river crossing. However, two experiences pull her out of her pessimism. The first is she falls in love with a cowboy Ennis. Second, she falls in love with the grandeur of nature, which as a city dweller she never fully experienced. The role of love is essential as a shield against pessimism. (Schopenhauer never married so never experienced the benefits of love.) One can be intellectually a pessimist such as Schopenhauer without succumbing emotionally to pessimism, which most likely would lead to depression. So Elsa’s wisdom is to accept Schopenhauer’s pessimism concerning the nature of reality without accepting his view that because “The whole world, after all, is an evil dream,” life isn’t worth living thus surrendering to a living form of suicidal resignation from life—which occurs in many forms via drugs, alcohol, or even certain religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism.

For Schopenhauer there was also losing oneself in the contemplation of art. Such an idea might seem strange until one experiences the beauties of Paris—its woods and parks, architecture and museums, in particular the Musée d'Orsay. As with the ancient Greeks, the French know the transporting power of art, so did Schopenhauer. Yet there is a sadness that comes with experiencing great works of art produced by humanity. It comes not from knowing the imperfections of the world of nature but knowing the imperfections of men. Just to think, Paris was almost destroyed during World War II. How ironic that Paris was spared destruction by a Nazi—Dietrich von Choltitz, “Saviour of Paris.” “Hitler did not completely give up on the destruction, with the Luftwaffe conducting an incendiary bombing raid on August 26, and V2 rockets fired from Belgium, causing extensive damage” (“Dietrich von Choltitz,” Wikipedia). And today Vladimir Putin has threaten to send nuclear warheads to Paris and London, delivered by his favorite new missile “Satan II.” The name is appropriate for Putin as well. It seems that if evil men acquire enough destructive technological power not even good men can prevent them from destroying civilization. I think this is resonated in the killing of Elsa. Who’s the pessimist now!

Elsa also learns the dark side of love in an imperfect world. Just as love pulls her out of her depressing pessimism her beloved cowboy is murdered. From such a loss one cannot completely recover. This is most clearly illustrated by Shea and her aunt Claire Dutton. The loss of her cowboy lover Ennis create a hole in her life that cannot be filled, just as it could not for Shea. That loss makes Shea a harsh overseer, not out of bitterness but out of concern for others. Neither that concern nor Shea’s altruism heals the wound caused by the deaths of his wife and daughter. The role of Good Samaritan doesn’t give him a new life but only purpose enough to continue to live, which was not the case for Claire.

Elsa finds love again and in that love reason enough to continue living. However, she is no longer the optimistic girl who began the journey. In this sense, the story is a bildungsroman, a growing up or “coming of age” story. Elsa begins the story as a child and ends as an adult having suffered disappointment and loss. Yet, her journey is also shared by the audience who wants everything to work out for Elsa and want a happy ending. But the audience, like Elsa, has to face the fact that reality is indifferent to human expectations. With the loss of Elsa the story shifts from being a bildungsroman to a tragedy. The ancient Greeks were the first to understand that life is a glorious yet tragic affair. They believed correctly that humans bring tragedy upon themselves unnecessarily by acting unwisely. That type of tragedy exists in 1883. But the tragic view of Taylor Sheridan’s 1883 goes beyond that of the generally optimistic Greeks who believed the world was perfect but humans weren’t. Let’s call it an existential tragedy. Tragedy that is unavoidable in an imperfect world.

Judeo-Christianity attempts to eliminate tragedy from life with a deus ex machina happy ending in a postmortem life. By doing so, cheats Elsa’s death of its tragedy—with such platitudes as “She’s with Jesus now.” No, she is simply gone. The loss of her life is absolute. There is no getting around it except in memory—as Shea does. However, because she was cut down in the youth of her life, memory of her bring more pain than joy. Her death resonates though the entire story. That is the poignancy of 1883 and is why I will watch the series only once. Yet, that is the purpose of 1883. It is not only a return to the western but also a return to reality.

That reality is expressed by Shakespeare in his tragedy Macbeth. King Macbeth is told that his wife has died. She is not loved by the audience but she is loved by the King. His response is this:

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing. (Act 5, scene 5)

He is in deep despair at the loss of his wife. In his pursuit of power he lost that which he loved most. There are two important ontological observations in the passage. The first is that dusty death awaits all things. The Second law of thermodynamics says the same. Second, the all—the Universe—is a tale told by an idiot of sorts. The meaning is that it has no grand purpose. Thus, in the great scheme of things the Universe is full of sound and fury but signifies nothing. It is without purpose. As physicist Carlo Rovelli puts it in his book Reality is not What It Seems, “There is no finality, no purpose, in this endless dance of atoms. We, just like the rest of the natural world, are one of many products of this infinite dance” (9). The irony here is that he is stating the view of philosopher-scientist Democritus who revealed twenty-three centuries ago the truth of human condition in a world made up of atoms. It’s not surprising that he was known as the “laughing philosopher.”

The life of the ancient Greeks and Native Americans were equally demanding and hazardous or more so. And their mythologies don’t make them the purpose of the universe. Yet, both celebrated joyfully living in the Earth-world that did not celebrate them.

The Native American

Again Luther Standing Bear: “The Lakota was a true naturist—a lover of Nature. He loved the earth and all things of the earth, the attachment growing with age.... Wherever the Lakota went, he was with Mother Earth. No matter where he roamed by day or slept by night, he was safe with her. This thought comforted and sustained the Lakota and he was eternally filled with gratitude. From Wakan Tanka there came a great unifying life force that flowed in and through all things—the flowers of the plains, blowing winds, rocks, trees, birds, animals.... Thus all things were kindred and brought together by the same Great Mystery. Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle” (192-193). Here there is no hatred of the Earth, no desire to flee to a spiritual realm, no ruling “over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground” (Genesis 1:26); and no pessimism just because the Earth-world is less perfect than what humans expect and because the Universe wasn’t made just for them.

The Greeks

I will let Aristotle speak for the Greek view:

“The glory, doubtless, of the heavenly bodies fills us with more delight than the contemplation of these lowly things; for the sun and stars are born not, neither do they decay, but are eternal and divine. But the heavens are high and afar off, and of celestial things the knowledge that our senses give us is scanty and dim. The living creatures, on the other hand, are at our door, and if we so desire it we may gain ample and certain knowledge of each and all. We take pleasure in the beauty of a statue, shall not then the living fill us with delight; and all the more if in the spirit of philosophy we search for causes and recognize the evidences of design. Then will nature’s purpose and her deep-seated laws be everywhere revealed, all tending in her multitudinous work to one form or another of the Beautiful” (Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way 37). Aristotle was great because he was a lover of life and regarded everything with intelligent appreciation. Yet, Christians consider Constantine I the greatest of all Roman Emperors though he was not only a destroyer of life but of Western civilization. He taught Romans to hate one another and to hate the members of all non-Christian civilizations.

Yes, that is also the ontology of 1883. However, what we also learn from Elsa is that the ontological condition that humans are thrown into does not preclude humans giving it and their existence meaning. It is a hard world, but it is also beautiful and full of potential meaning that make one’s brief existence meaningful. That is summed up in Elsa’s beauty and loving nature. Beauty and love are absolute values that can give absolute meaning to life—as they do to Elsa and to those who know her. Her role in the film is to represent all that is good and meaningful in life. And instead of complaining that life is cruel and imperfect and leads only to death, she embraces the fullness of life—the good and the bad. And, as Shea notes, she lives fully during the brief time of her life.

God and the Failure of Nerve

Kant said that “God is a useful fiction developed by the human mind” (Will & Ariel Durant, The Story of  Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution 550).Yes, the fiction has had many uses such as serving the wills to power of such men as Constantine I and justifying men lording over women. It also has served as a palliative for what Gilbert Murray calls in his Five Stages of Greek Religion “the failure of nerve”—to face reality.  So an artificial reality—a religious security blanket—was created in which death need not be final. Elsa—like Schopenhauer—faces reality as it is. She doesn’t allow grief, sadness, and disappointment to cause her to lose her nerve.

Religion not only cheats life of the tragedy but of its value. First of all, the invention of God demotes the value of the material world—our world, the Earth world—the one we actually live in, the world that sustains and entertains us and gives our lives concrete purpose. The invention of God created an eclipse that cast a shadow over the lifeworld because the invented God logically becomes the more important than the world “he” supposedly created and manages. But Elsa chooses to live in the realm of red-pill reality rather than in a blue-pill make-believe made from words. She, like the school boy, prefers to be outdoors in nature surrounded by mountains, fields, and forests. The loss of Elsa’s life is an absolute loss—as seen in the faces of her mother and father and her friends. But the absolute loss of her death reveals the absolute value of her life. Death is a more honest teacher than a Christian preacher. It says value life, value existing in a world that is as magnificent as it is terrifying. Death and her own heart are Elsa’s teachers. She learns to appreciate life in the here and now while she can.

Without God life becomes an adventure. With God it becomes a tall tale with a predetermined end told by men who knew nothing about life because they lived in the house of religious myth, a house made of words without windows. Nuns are women who live according to the myth and escape from the world by confining themselves in convents. The houses are churches, mosques, and synagogues. But like the school-boy confined in a school house, Elsa prefers to live in the real world in spite of its dangers because she wants to live freely and truthfully. And she finds the real world to be a glorious adventure that reveals the multiplicity of its reality to the senses, the windows that open upon the world, rather than in words and the imagination. 

The Bell Curves of Gender

The Bell Curve of Masculinity

Freud would characterize masculine aggression as a primary instinct of the most primitive part of the human personality—the id. It is an evolutionary weapon that evolved to protect and feed humans for most of humanity’s existence. It became encoded in the genetic makeup of men. A bell curve would categorize some men as violently aggressive, some not aggressive, and most falling in the middle range. Carl Jung would characterize the situation in terms of the anima (subconscious feminine psychological qualities) and the animus (subconscious masculine psychological qualities). Men and women possess both to varying degrees. Important here is that aggression in men seems to be a deadly absolute like gravity.

The Bell Curve of Femininity

In the DNA bell curve of women, aggressive women are a minority—though abuse and culture can cause women to act inconsistent with the genetic tendencies. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger became a Nazi because doing so served his will to power ambition. A philosopher who would uncritically become a Nazi is a sham philosopher. Philosophy is essentially a discipline of skepticism that is supposed to prevent thinkers from succumbing to nonsensical claims (illogical, non-empirical), especially those of religious and secular ideologies. In addition, philosophical ethics would be especially critical of such claims when they encourage violence toward others. However, most shocking is that his wife Elfriede also became an avid Nazi. By doing so, she acted contrary to the genetic tendencies of women. She became a Nazi before her husband did and remained a Nazi longer than he did.  Rüdiger Safranski says in his biography of Heidegger, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, that as a party activist, she brutally mistreated women, having “no scruples in ‘sending sick and pregnant women to dig entrenchments’” (387).

Judaism’s Demonization of the Feminine and Deification of Masculine

Generally, the psychology of women can be characterized as caring, compassionate, kind, and altruistic. The Old Testament is a celebration of and testament to masculine aggression, but occasionally the qualities of the female shine through, even at the very beginning. The female Eve discovers a tasty brain-boosting fruit and the first thing she does is share it with her boyfriend Adam. And aggressive masculinity also appears in the first book of the Old Testament in God, aka Yahweh. The most interesting thing about Yahweh is that “he” is pure aggressive masculinity. In Genesis “he” punishes all of humanity with suffering and death because of the behavior of the two youngsters who gave birth to the human species and humanity’s first human, male murderer Cain—with whom God sided with after Cain murdered his brother Abel.

Yahweh also causes an extinction event with a flood. "He" is supposed to be forgiven because "he" saved a boatload of humans and other creatures, but all the drowned humans and other creatures remained dead. "He" destroys cities full of people "he" dislikes (and children are unable to avoid the holocaust), and, as the rest of the Old Testament tells us, "he" found all of humanity except for his chosen people to be an abomination. And "he" often found them to be abominable as well. Later on, "he" encourages his people to carry out his wrath against the people "he" hates (pagan nature worshipers) by exterminating them and destroying and looting their cities. That looks a lot like what Putin is doing today. Even gentle Jesus gives into masculine aggression: 

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's foes will be members of one's own household” (Matthew 10:34-36). 

So, if one wants to investigate masculine aggression, the Bible is a good place to begin. Generally, the Old Testament doesn’t show much respect for women while often praising the despicable behavior of the men—even the so-called great heroes such as King David who had a loyal soldier Uriah killed in order to take Uriah’s wife Bathsheba as his eighth wife. David’s son King Solomon with a harem that included 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3) makes Hugh Hefner look like an amateur. Solomon wasn’t wise, just a dirty old female-molesting man. See Giovanni Venanzi‘s painting King Solomon being led astray into idolatry in his old age by his wives (1668) and note who gets the blame. Of course, his real crime isn’t idolatry but unbridled lust that leads to the reification and subordination of women.

Really, how many of those wives and concubines wanted to be part of his harem? Question:  Were the wives and concubines of David and Solomon in reality sex slaves? King David’s treatment of ten concubines suggest the answer is yes: “When David returned to his palace in Jerusalem, he took the ten concubines he had left to take care of the palace [sex toys and maids] and put them in a house under guard.... They were kept in confinement till the day of their death, living as widows” (2 Samuel 20:3). And Christians believes Jesus is ennobled by being a descendant of the line of David forever ruling in righteousness. David was hardly a righteous man, in reality the opposite.

Ruth: The Embodiment of Feminine Goodness

The Book of Ruth is a notable exception to the endless descriptions of the disgusting behavior of men in the Old Testament. Loving, devoted, good-girl Ruth is a big surprise in a very big book filled with hateful, aggressive, sex-obsessed, and often evil men like King David and his sex-addicted son. Ruth's altruism serves as a foil to the Old Testament’s central theme of predation. In story Ruth and Orpah of Moab had married two sons of Elimelech and Naomi. After the husbands of all three women die, Naomi urges her daughters-in-law to return to their families. Orpah does so, but Ruth will not abandon her mother-in-law, saying quite movingly, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried” (1:16-17). It’s significant that Naomi advises that her daughters-in-law return to their families. That the role of family in life is essential was considered axiomatic by ancient cultures. The importance of family in Native American cultures is beautifully described in Ella Cara Deloria’s Waterlily, which explores family life among Dakota (Sioux) Indians.

Ruth represents pure selflessness. She isn’t worried about death but about her mother-in-law Naomi. The painting Naomi with her Daughters-in-Law by Henry Nelson O'Neil (1817-80) captures feminine love and beauty. It’s noteworthy that the story and the painting illustrates that life has profound meaning without God. The film 1883 illustrates that as well. Raphael’s painting Madonna in the Meadow shows that—unlike God—women, children, and nature are tangible sources of meaning that inspire love and appreciation. God exists only in words, and those words have had a negative effect on how people treat one another.

In addition, Ruth’s feminine altruistic, selfless human-centered ethics—motivated by love—are superior to Yahweh’s hate-filled, God-centered ethics. I will add at this point the altruistic ethics of the Good Samaritan. His ethical motivation isn’t love but duty (but maybe love as well). Doing one’s duty is a great virtue as long as it is altruistic—helping creatures vulnerable to suffering. Good Samaritan altruism is also often illustrated in 1883. In the film we see that family has a humanizing effect on men. It doesn’t feminize them so much as it gives their lives a raison d'etre that is motivated not just by duty but also by love.

Altruism in 1883

James Dillard Dutton’s altruism is motivated primarily by his love for his family, yet this love widens over time to include others. James is an important male character because he is an instinctive killer. Bazin says, “If it is to be effective, this justice must be dispensed by men who are just as strong and just as daring as the criminals” (146). James is certainly that, but his family life repurposed his masculine killer tendency to protect others. Shea Brennan seems primarily motivated by duty, which he sees as convincing others to act prudently and wisely and in a disciplined manner because not doing so results in tragedy, which it often does in the story. The consequences of not acting prudently are illustrated early the in the series. James shoots dead a drunk man who attempts to rape his daughter (being drunk is no excuse for rape) and by Claire Dutton’s throwing rocks at dangerous men with guns. Shea Brennan often expresses too harshly his demands for sensible, disciplined behavior in part because he is a former military officer, and the settlers are ordinary people, not disciplined soldiers, as his friend Thomas, a former soldier and slave, has to remind him. However, his concern for others seems to be rooted his love of his wife and daughter. He fears that the settlers’ lack of discipline will bring disaster upon them, and it does.  However, duty is not an inherent good: duty to good is good; duty to evil is evil.

A Good Woman Isn’t Hard Find

In my long life I have met many good men and a few bad men, some capable of evil behavior. I have also met many women—family members, colleagues, friends, lovers, and acquaintances. Each was, in her own way, beautiful. Yes, as 1883 illustrates with Claire Dutton some women can be meanspirited, angry, and verbally abusive. However, Claire’s mean-spiritedness most likely resulted from having lost six children and apparently a husband. Endless hardships and disappointments can make the best of people angry and spiteful. I’m arguing that Claire’s negativity didn’t come naturally but as a result of having lived a life of hard knocks and disappointment. When a group of masculine thugs ride into camp she unwisely throws rocks at the leader causing the men’s barely repressed masculine aggression to flare up. The men murder a number of settlers including Claire’s daughter. Still, as the series indicates with other women, Claire’s negative thinking and behavior are an aberration. The other women in the series are kind, caring, and compassionate.

What I am claiming is that 1883 is an example of masculine feminism, a feminist perspective expressed by a man. This is more than moderate philosophical-political feminism because it is an expression of love—if you will—for women. The writer of the series is Taylor Sheridan, and given its feminist (feminine is a more precise word) themes I believe it can be considered an example of masculine feminism. He is married to Nicole Muirbrook and she might have been an influence on his thinking about women. Before 1883 he showed masculine feminism in his movie Wind River, which depicts the aggressive behavior of evil men toward a Native American woman and the role of the masculine hero to seek justice.

Though Sheridan returned to the traditional western, he did so with greater emphasis on the significance of the female presence. The traditional western portrays the conflict between good men and evil men in which women play a passive though essential symbolic role (Stagecoach, Shane, and My Darling Clementine) representing love, marriage, family, school, and church—masculinity's raison d'être. Nevertheless, they receive greater value than Mary does in the New Testament. Mary—the so-called mother of God—is a minor character in the New Testament. She is mentioned by name twelve times in the Gospel of Luke, five times in the Gospel of Matthew, once in the Gospel of Mark, and once in the Book of Acts. Judaism and Christianity played a dominant role in marginalizing the value of women in society. In a sense, Sheridan returns to the valuation of women by pre-Christian societies such as that of Native Americans and the ancient Greeks.

The Feminine Inspiration for 1883

It is said that Isabel May was Sheridan’s inspiration for 1883, an inspiration that recalls Dante being inspired by Beatrice to write the Divine Comedy. (See the painting Dante and Beatrice by the artist Henry Holiday dated 1883.) The Divine Comedy is a journey among the dead. Entering into the realm of the dead is the central theme of Judeo-Christianity—not life. Elsa Dutton is the central figure of 1883. Hers is a journey into what she represents—life—in all its complexity, beauty, enchantment, possibilities, successes, failures, euphoric moments, and ultimate tragedy, not death, though death is ever present.

The Haunting Presence of Death and the Glory of Life

Contrary to what Christianity would have us believe, death is nothing to look forward to. It is the end of all that is good, sublime, and wonderful—all bundled in the character Elsa Dutton. Unfortunately, that is also why Elsa must die—to remind us to appreciate (and protect) life while we are alive. Elsa’s role in 1883 similar to the female in Eugène Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People. However, what Elsa represents is not leadership or liberty (yes a little of the latter for women) but the raison d'être for human existence, especially for masculinity. She represents glorious femininity. She is beautiful in the way nature is beautiful. Her beauty is organic, not artificial. She inspires love and returns love—as a lover but also as a child and friend. Her loss as a lover, child, and friend is terrible. The film is designed in such a way as to make her loss unsettling to the viewer. Elsa’s story deeply depressed my wife who is a mother of a daughter and granddaughter.

Elsa’s Haunting Death

The death of Elsa reminds one of the Marabar cave incident in Forster’s A Passage to India. Poor Mrs. Moore hears that terrifying echo: bou-oum ou-boum. Everything exists, yet nothing has absolute value. All had emerged from a dunghill created by the Big Bang. She wanted there to be more. Poor little talkative Christianity, she thought. In that echo, as in Elsa’s death and the death of her beloved cowboy, humanity is stripped of its guise of transcendent, eternal value. Her death embodied perhaps the most painful truth of human existence: that ultimately nothing lasts and nothing matters in the great cosmic scheme of things. (This is the central theme of literary naturalism, which 1883 echoes.) That is the hard lesson Elsa learns. With her death it becomes a tragic lesson for the viewer as well. Yes, she has loved and valued, but she was denied fulfilling her love and self-realization. And it was not only her pain. Her death shakes to the core of the being those who survive her. At her death, Shea Brennan attempts some consoling words—true and wise—yet they cannot bring Elsa back nor fill the terrible emptiness caused by her absence.

There is no consolation except perhaps that of having known her. It is a loss that was experienced by Shea when he lost his wife Helen and daughter to smallpox. As accustomed as he is to loss, he too is traumatized by Elsa’s death. The film reminds us that loss is a universal, inescapable part of the human condition—of everything really. To express this aspect of the human condition the ancient Greeks invented tragedy, which is essentially what 1883 is. As the film shows, there is no escaping the tragic side of existence. It comes to everything. And thankfully Sheridan doesn’t try to soften tragedy with religion. There is in the film no indication that the dead are on their way to a glorious afterlife. They are buried in the dirt, to which they will return; then they will be forgotten once the generations that knew them are also gone.

Death is not evil. Men who cause unnecessary death are evil. That is the hardest lesson Elsa has to learn. Death is not evil because it is the very nature of reality that everything that exists must come to an end. The stuff that makes existence possible is unable to preserve that which it creates or even itself. Physics tells us that the primordial stuff out of which the cosmos and its inhabitants are made will deteriorate and dissolved into nothingness. Democritus believed his atoms were forever. They’re not. The word “atom” means cannot be cut, but they can be cut and are by atom colliders. Thus they, like everything else, are composites that disintegrates and disappear. Even our magnificent planet—Earth—will be killed, ironically by that sustainer of life the Sun.

Unlike Christianity, the Greeks Loved Femininity

Like Taylor Sheridan, ancient Greek civilization was one that was very much inspired by women. Their art, in particular their pottery and sculpture, along with their numerous goddesses testify to their love of the feminine. Homer’s Iliad is about a war fought over a woman. And his Odyssey is about the journey of one of the war’s heroes, Odysseus, who seeks to return home to his wife the faithful Penelope, who is being assaulted by mischievous suitors. During his journey he encounters notable females such as Helen, Nausicaa, and Circe. Of the greatest importance is that for the Greeks women were to be celebrated, not condemned, as they are by Judaism and Christianity.

According to those religions, a single woman—a girl really—was the cause of all of humanity’s problems—a female Pandora’s Box. In the New Testament Jesus spends a good deal of his time protecting women from abusive Pharisees. The Pharisee who was the most hateful of all toward women was Apostle Paul. He never mentions Mary in his letters. In addition, he was a hater of the flesh, which he considered inherently sinful. He associated women most closely with sinful flesh: 

“Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want” (Gal 5:16-17). 

“If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit” (Gal 6:8). 

Like the invention of God, the invention of the spirit demoted the material Earth-world. All matter is despicable flesh to spirit worshipers like Paul. Spirit is pure no-thing. Actually, however, sowing the flesh produces children, not corruption. But Paul had little use for children. All he can say about them is, “Children, obey your parents as in the Lord” (Ephesians 6:1).

He also tells slaves to obey their masters: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ” (Ephesians 6:5). American slaveholders would use the passage to justify slavery. And, of course, he tells women to obey their husbands: “Wives, obey your husbands as you obey the Lord. The husband is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the church people” (Ephesians 5:22-23). Husbands are the lords of the family and women are their vassals. What is clear here is how Judeo-Christianity is used to religiously justify masculinity’s oppression and exploitation of others.

For the Abrahamic religions, rooted in Judaism, obedience is everything. Whereas in 1883 freedom and children are celebrated. The immigrants seek to escape the oppression of their homeland and Thomas is a former slave. Elsa’s father encourages freedom rather than discipline. Her mother is more of a disciplinarian but her motivation isn’t loyalty to God but to Elsa’s welfare. Jesus wasn’t much better than Paul. He says, 

“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them. (Mark 10:14-16) 

Again it’s all about God, not the children themselves—who are an inherent value associated with the female. His message is twofold: (1) do not hinder the children from embracing my religious ideology, and (2) adults accept my religious ideology as obedient children. There is no ideology—religious or secular in 1883. The bountifulness of life is all you get, and it is more than enough to people like Elsa who experience life with appreciative awareness. And children are one of the primordial values of life as Elsa and her brother John Dutton illustrate.

Artists—not God-centered religious ideologues—reveal most movingly the importance of women and children. Let’s begin with Raphael Madonna of the Meadow: mother, children, and nature are all that really matter in this painting. All the religion gets is a stick in the shape of a crucifix:

Better yet, Edward Henry Potthast’s beach scenes of women and children and dads. Notably Happy Days, late 1890s. God isn’t needed for life to be enchanting. That is the message and insight we get from Raphael, Potthast, and Sheridan. What Sheridan adds is that that which enchants life must be protected, not just celebrated, because it is constantly threatened.

In Romans (8:3–4), Paul says, “For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” Thus, Jesus was born of the sinful flesh of Mary, but conception was miraculous—with God—in the role of dirty old man—impregnating Mary: 

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favoured one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus....” Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.... Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her. (Luke 1:26-38) 

Clearly, Mary isn't thrilled about being impregnated by God. (The idea of a god impregnating a human woman was probably adopted from Greek mythology that has Father Zeus impregnated a number of human females, including Alcmene, Antiope, Callisto, Danae, Europa, and Lamia.) This incident was repeated endlessly by kings/lords to servant girls, and they could use the biblical passage to justify their sexual aggression. Mary does her duty. She is treated as a tool and must behave as one. Compare this depiction of women as the servants of men, angels, and God with the freedom allowed Elsa to live her life as she sees fit—including giving herself to a cowboy and a Comanche warrior—and to ride, shoot, and dress as men do. The values expressed in 1883 are human-centered rather than God-centered, i.e. masculinity-centered.

Apostle Paul is disgusted by the fact that Jesus came into the world via female flesh and worse had to live in the flesh. Paul says, “For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner” (1 Timothy 2:13–14). Stupid women, they ruin everything! That is why he says, “As in all the congregations of the Lord’s people. Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church” (1 Corinthians 14:33–35). The message to women is STFU! And it should not be overlooked that Judaism and Christianity are the products of the masculine mind. 

The Ancient Greeks offered a Contrary Attitude toward Women

Unlike the Jews, the ancient Greeks valued women for themselves because the Greeks believed women had intrinsic value. Appreciation and understanding of women were absent among the Jews, for whom women had only conditional utilitarian value, as the treatment of Mary illustrates as well has Eve having been created as a helpmate—not a lover—for Adam (Genesis 2:18). Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras, Epicurus, and Plato accepted women as students of equal merit. Plato considered women as equals and was in the process of liberating women as guardians of the state or philosopher-kings. What might the world have been like had nations been ruled by women? Marge Piercy explores that question in her novel Woman on the Edge of Time. Here is what Plato says via Socrates speaking with Polemarchus and Adeimantus in The Republic: 

“If, then, we are to use the women for the same things as the men, [452a] we must also teach them the same things.”

“Yes.”

“Now music together with gymnastic was the training we gave the men.”

“Yes.”

“Then we must assign these two arts to the women also and the offices of war and employ them in the same way.... But the natural capacities are distributed alike among both creatures, and women naturally share in all pursuits and men in all.... [455e] The women and the men, then, have the same nature in respect to the guardianship of the state, save in so far as the one is weaker, the other stronger.”

“Apparently.” [456b]

This is a lesson that Native Americans learned from nature. Among lions and bears the female is quite impressive. Ancient Greek society was defined by the heroic idea. It was a warring culture; thus the participation of women in public affairs was nonexistent except for festivals and religion. But these were essentially practical restrictions determined by the conditions of life.

However, women having a subordinate role in public/political affairs did not mean they were looked down upon as being inferior to men. Their value was equal to that of men. As David’s painting reveals—women, children, and the home was what the warriors defended. This is summed up in Hector’s farewell words to his wife Andromache and son Astyanax. The Greeks have invaded Troy and Hector must defend the city, though his wife does not want him to leave her and his son:

 Then tall Hektor of the shining helm answered her: “All these

things are in my mind also, lady; yet I would feel deep shame

before the Trojans, and the Trojan women with trailing garments,

if like a coward I were to shrink aside from the fighting.... 

But it is not so much the pain to come of the Trojans that troubles me….

as troubles me the thought of you, when some bronze-armoured

Achaian leads you off, taking away your day of liberty....

But may I be dead and the piled earth hide me under before I

hear you crying and know by this that they drag you captive.”

So speaking glorious Hektor held out his arms to his baby,

who shrank back to his fair-girdled nurse’s bosom

screaming, and frightened at the aspect of his own father,

terrified as he saw the bronze and the crest with its horse-hair,

nodding, dreadfully, as he thought, from the peak of the helmet.

Then his beloved father laughed out, and his honoured mother,

and at once glorious Hektor lifted from this head the helmet

and laid it in all its shining upon the ground. Then taking

up his dear son he tossed him about in his arms, and kissed him,

and lifted his voice in prayer to Zeus and the other immortals:

“Zeus, and you other immortals, grant that this boy, who is my son,

may be as I am, pre-eminent among the Trojans....”

So speaking he set his child again in the arms of his beloved

wife, who took him back again to her fragrant bosom

smiling in her tears; and he husband saw, and took pity upon her,

and stroked her with his hand, and called her by name and spoke to her:

“Poor Andromache! Why does your heart sorrow so much for me?

No man is going to hurl me to Hades, unless it is fated,

but as for fate, I think that no man yet has escaped it

once it has taken its first form, neither brave man nor coward.” (Iliad, lines 6.447 – 489)

And this from the heroic age of Homer (8^th century BC) when all Greek men were warriors and war was a common occurrence. The lack of progress toward retiring war as a pastime over a period of twenty-eight centuries is both amazing and disheartening. Homer’s poem and the myth of the Trojan War celebrate brave warriors, not so much war itself. And archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann has shown that the war was not necessarily fiction. His discovery of Troy revealed the city was destroyed numerous times. In any case, the above lines illustrate a Greek warrior’s love for his wife and son—28 centuries ago! He is a good man fighting evil men who have invaded his city. He is the kind of man Top of the Lake overlooks. Without good men like Hektor there would be no hope for human society.

Two points need to be made here. First, we see sadness expressed in response to a father and husband having to join the fight to save his city. However, there is no pessimistic gnashing of teeth and whining about how evil life is. No failure of nerve or concluding life is not worth living. Clearly, Hektor believed it was worth living and even dying for. That failure of nerve will come much later during the Hellenistic era that precedes the arrival of Jesus and his offer of a better eternal life in the postmortem. This failure of nerve was based on history and occurred among common folks who are feeling powerless against historical reality.

The sentiment is expressed wonderfully ironically in the Old Testament’s Ecclesiastes. Which is interesting for two reasons. First, it strongly suggests that humans can’t rely on God’s help. That book expresses a theological pessimism and historical condition that sets the stage for the coming of Jesus with his reassurance to ordinary folks (the have-nots) that God has not given up on them. Ecclesiastes expresses a pessimistic sentiment in response to evil men thriving in society while good people suffer and with no help from God. The way I see it the problem is an absence of God and heroes. In 1883 masculine heroes (and a few heroines) pick up the slack caused by God's absence. Second, the preacher doesn’t give up on life or allow his pessimism to cause a failure of nerve. His advice is as follows. Okay, God isn’t going to do anything about evil men, but that is no reason not to enjoy life as best as one can:

Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do. Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 9:7-8) 

This attitude to make the most of life because life offers a cornucopia of meaningful experiences (big and small) in spite of the evil caused by evil men is very much Elsa’s philosophy. 

The Greeks’ Response to Pessimism

Stoics and Epicureans

During the time of Ecclesiastes, the Hellenistic era, the Greeks were also addressing a loss of confidence that leads to a hopeless pessimism that can result in a failure of nerve, as occurs to Odysseus crew who then become lotus eating drug addicts who give up on life. The two most notable schools were the Stoics and the Epicureans. They were early forms of psychotherapy. Each used reason to find how to live a good (happy) life in an imperfect world. However, their rational approach (similar to Shea’s in 1883) couldn’t compete with the pie-in-the-sky fantasy of Christianity.

Euripides and Werner Jaeger

Most impressive is Euripides (480–406 BC) philosophical approach to life. He wasn’t a philosopher but an artist, a tragedian.  No Greek understood the paradox of war better than Homer, but war sickened the wise and sensitive Euripides. It was a melancholy topic for him for two reasons. His love and appreciation of women, in spite of two failed marriages, was the first. He wrote many tragedies concerning women, including tragedies about women who suffered as a result of the Trojan War: Andromache, Hecuba, The Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Tauris. Second, war seemed unavoidable, which apparently it is.  Here is what Werner Jaeger says in Paideia: The Ideal of Greek Culture about Euripides’ play The Phoenicians Women: Euripides “portrays most movingly and tragically the daemonic urge to power which rules all masterful men” (vol 1, 351). Jaeger’s views were most likely influenced by his times. He was a German scholar whose anti-Nazi views caused Nazi academics to sharply attack him. He emigrated to the United States because he was unhappy with the rise of Nazism (“Jaeger,” Wikipedia). He wrote Paideia during World War II.

Euripides wrote four centuries before Jesus and really to no effect; otherwise, there would have been no World Wars or Vietnam War or Iraq War or the war in Ukraine. Euripides represented reason thus questioned the irrational thinking of religion and unrestrained nationalism. Of course, Jesus’ religion eclipsed the light of reason of the Greeks. Moral reason, in particular, still remains eclipsed by  the shadow of unreason, as the war in Ukraine illustrates. And by the way, in reference to the passage from Homer’s Iliad neither Hektor, his wife Andromache nor his son Astyanax survive. Hektor is slain by Achilles, and in Euripides’s The Trojan Women Astyanax is thrown from the city’s walls by Neoptolemus who then takes Andromache as a concubine. The lesson here is sometimes good men can’t prevent harm done by evil men. As invaders the Greeks—like the Russians today—are evil; as defenders of Troy and its occupants—like the Ukrainians defending their homeland—are good men (along with some women fighters). One can only hope that the Ukrainians fair better than the Trojans did. What is the relevance of all this to 1883? All the efforts of good men could not save Elsa. The lessons are evil men are not to be underestimated, and to the misandric feminists don’t denigrate women’s only salvation: good men.

Schopenhauer Again

Twenty centuries later the Second Coming hadn’t occurred, so Arthur Schopenhauer showed up with his cosmic pessimism and says it’s time to take the red pill. That is the second failure of nerve is related more to ontology than to history. In other words, pervasive evil and God’s no-show indicates indicate that the ultimate reality of the cosmos isn’t God but an irrational will that drives everything. I would add that this so-called drive can be very creative (it produced Earth and Elsa) but also overwhelmingly destructive especially when channeled through evil men. 

Men, Wars, and the Butterfly Effect

The Trojan War was started by one foolish man, Paris, son of the Trojan king, who runs off Troy with Helen, the wife of the Greek king Menelaus. Playboy Paris’ only excuse is that Helen was irresistible. Jacques-Louis David painted the two lovebirds: 

His action would result in a ten year war that would destroy his people. I don’t consider Paris an evil man. He acted out of love and stupidity and had no idea that his actions would have a butterfly effect, which is according to chaos theory a minute phenomenon in a complex system having large effects elsewhere. Individual foolish and/or evil men have triggered the butterfly effect throughout history with catastrophic effects, most destructively war.

World War I was caused by the actions of a single man with the help of demented emperor of Austria Franz Joseph I. Hitler, more evil than stupid, flapped his diabolical wings and cause World War II. After that war was over the United States had an opportunity to become a Shining City on a Hill to the world had it stuck with civil rights, and other beneficial social programs; instead a single politician bloated with stupidity and hubris—LBJ—flapped is demonic wings and kicked off the Vietnam War, which did great harm to Vietnam but Vietnam recovered. America didn’t.

The war divided nation and put it on a path of self-loathing and self-destruction. And then with God’s permission Gorge W. Bush flapped his wings of lies and invaded Iraq, insuring that America would never recover from its decline. And most recently narcissistic, diabolical Putin sent his his army of sadists into Ukraine. Whereas politicians  like of LBJ, Bush, and Putin wreck nations, flapping their wings Apostle Paul and Constantine I wrecked Western civilization—which was not rooted in Judaism, a religion imported from the East—Egypt—but in Greek culture. Stupid and/or evil individual men with armies have been to humanity juggernauts horror, carnage, and destruction. The bubonic pandemic of the 14^th century wasn’t evil, just really bad. Men who start wars are evil. The Abrahamic Gods—Yahweh, Christ, and Allah that encourage men to start wars of invasion or civil wars are also evil.

The combined scriptures of the Abrahamic religions contribute nothing of value to the advancement of humanity because they are based on hate-inspiring myths. The number of wars each has caused is beyond counting. On the other hand, a single Greek philosopher had laid the intellectual foundation for Western civilization—Aristotle. He made important contributions to logic, physics, psychology, biology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetics. And he was a pagan who loved this world and wanted to understand it, not flee from it.

Aristotle created his library at his school the Lyceum and wrote as many as 200 treatises and other works covering all areas of philosophy and science. And all this four centuries before the arrival of Jesus who gave us not a single fact—logical or empirical—about the world. Judeo-Christianity was a destroyer of knowledge, not a creator of knowledge. Carlo Rovelli says, “But centuries dominated by monotheism have not permitted the survival of Democritus’s naturalism. The closure of the ancient schools such as those of Athens and Alexandria and the destruction of all the texts not in accordance with Christian ideas were vast and systematic, at the time of the brutal anti-pagan repression...” (20). And among those pagans were Stoics, Epicureans, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Summing up this catastrophe to Western civilization, historian Charles Freeman ends The Closing of the Western Mind with “I would reiterate the central theme of this book: that the Greek intellectual tradition was suppressed rather than simply faded away.” According to Freeman, this was “an important moment in European cultural history” (340). That is the reason his book is titled The Closing of the Western Mind. It was more than that, though. It was the destruction of classical Western civilization that had been guided for centuries by free thinking philosophers, scientists, and life-loving artists, replaced by temple-based civilization controlled by closed-minded, superstitious priests. Thus, arrived the Dark Ages. And all the carnage and destruction was brought about by God-obsessed men who placed the value of God above the value of human beings. Thinking about evil men and the butterfly effect, it’s easy to become a pessimist.

Paul Was a Hater of Sexuality

And, unfortunately, his negative view of life would be the one adopted by the Catholic Church and forced upon Western civilization. Sex and the flesh were inherently sinful. That why priests and nuns are celibate. And it was all Paul’s doing. Considering sex inherently sinful Paul believed if at all possible it should be avoided. According to him it was best to adopt him as a role model and remain celibate: “Now to the unmarried and the widows I say it is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion” (1 Corinthians 7:8-9). Missing here is love! And he never considered how unnatural and unfun such a life is. He knew nothing about love because he was a narcissist—no wife, no lover, no boyfriends or girlfriends. Not even a pet, like Elsa’s horse. There was nothing in nature he loved. His life was truly empty—filled only with hate and a longing for death.

Following Paul’s advice means avoiding a relationship such as the one shared by Elsa and her cowboy Ennis. That means no falling in love, no boy-girl romance, no courting and getting married, no having children, and no becoming parents like Elsa’s parents. No life, as far as I’m concern. Paul lived in the land of make-believe like Dorothy in Oz, which was only a dream. The no-fun celibate Paul believed the Second Coming and the Rapture would occur during his lifetime. Two thousand years later, Christians are still waiting. The main thing here is Paul’s focus was on death. To him death wasn’t a tragedy but the first step to resurrection and spiritual existence in the postmortem. It really doesn’t qualify as a life because there is nothing to do in the postmortem. Elsa, on the other hand, makes the most of her life in the here and now—enjoying the paradise that is Earth, appreciating beauty, falling in love, working, being free, and having friends. She wanted children, clearly, because she wanted to participate in the organic creativity of nature, and by doing so fulfilling her potential as a woman along with doing all the stuff men do.

Paul is pure self-centered masculinity. He denies everything of value that is associated with femininity—flesh and brains. And, like or not, Jesus does the same by considering men to be the only people worthy of his company and by rejecting his family including his glorious mother Mary (who would be immediately embraced by Italian artists) but also James, Joseph, Simon, Jude, and unnamed sisters mentioned in Mark and Matthew. Michelangelo's Pietà celebrates Mary, not Jesus whom she dwarfs. She is a celebration of beauty and motherhood.

 Misogynist Laszlo Toth attacked the statue with 15 hammer blows, breaking off Mary's arm at the elbow, knocked off a chunk of her nose, and chipped one of her eyelids. He was declared insane. This is exactly what Christians did to Greek and Roman statues of female goddesses. Ideologies can make men insane. Richard Dawkins says as much in his article “Viruses of the Mind”: “human minds are ripe or malignant infection” by ideologies. Such behavior illustrates Christian misogyny rooted in Paul's anti-female religious ideology illustrated in  French painter Jules-Eugène Lenepveu's Joan at the Stake in Rouen. Notice that poor Joan is surrounded by men who are evil because they serve evil, the Church’s hatred of femininity. She appeals to God, but like Jesus on the cross she has been abandoned by God:

In addition, the artist used light and location to make Joan the focal value in the painting, the only element of goodness and beauty. She is glorious compared to the Crucifix that serves  to justify her immolation, a sacrifice to the Christian God. The Crucifix is an invented abstraction, a scepter representing the Church’s power. Whereas Joan is fleshly real symbolizing life, the Crucifix is a symbol of death, a tool used to justify controlling and destroying lives.

Jesus even rejects his hometown for rejecting him as the messiah because he wouldn’t perform miracles. In other words, he wouldn’t prove what he claimed to be. Here is his peevish response to the rejection “Truly I tell you... no prophet is accepted in his Hometown” (Luke 4:24). What is most important is that Jesus placed his personal ideology above all else. And as a religious ideology it elevates the supernatural above all the values associated with humanity’s Earthly way of life. This is the masculine nihilism that lurks in the ideologies of the Abrahamic religions: compared to the absolute, supreme value of God, all else is worthless.

The invention of Abrahamic God introduced nihilism into the world. Native Americans and the ancient Greeks had had their gods, but they were integrated into nature and Earthly life. The Greeks especially had many of female goddesses:

Hestia, goddess of Goddess of home and hearth.

Hebe, goddess of youth.

Leto, goddess of Goddess of motherhood.

Rhea, goddess of motherhood and fertility.

Aphrodite, goddess of goddess of love, beauty, and sexual pleasure.

Demeter, goddess of seasons and crops.

Artemis, protector of young girls up into the age of marriage.

Hera, goddess of marriage and childbirth.

And most of all Gaia, goddess of Earth and mother of all life. 

Women even served as priestesses, the most famous of which was the Oracle of Delphi.  The best illustrations of the ancient Greeks’ love of the feminine are two statues of Venus: the famous Venus de Milo (2^nd century BC) and The Callypigian Venus (1^st century BC):

Her arms were most likely knocked off by Apostle Paul inspired Christians. They spent a lot time destroying Greek statues, other works of art, and libraries as described in Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age. How different the world might have been for women and everyone else had the ancient Greek philosophy and art rather than Jewish religious ideology had guided Western civilization’s future.

The presence of the feminine is totally absent in the theology of the Abrahamic religions. Because Native Americans and the ancient Greeks saturated nature with deities, almost every aspect of nature had value. Nature does have creatures that threaten life, but that is because life is energy dependent. Carnivores get energy from other animals and herbivories get it from plants. Plants are—with a few exceptions—the most peaceful organisms because they take their energy directly from the Sun. Because life is energy dependent, predation is unavoidable except in a world of plants and robots. Elsa becomes angry with the world for being such a life-threatening place because it threatens and kills people she loves.

What she doesn’t understand—at least early on—is that reality can’t be otherwise if life is to be present. Her complaint only makes sense if God created the world for humans. Then it’s possible to criticize God on moral grounds for not making the world more friendly to life. This is what is called the problem of evil, first serious address by Ecclesiastes and most recently discussed by the biblical scholar Bart Ehrman’s God's Problem, which is the problem of evil existing in a world supposedly created by an all-powerful and all-good deity. Given God’s problem was first discussed in the Old Testament in Book of Ecclesiastes, the most insightful book in the Bible, and the Book of Job, it’s been a nagging question for over 2,000 years. 

Alfred Tennyson confronted the question in In Memoriam, which was written in response to the death of his best friend Hallam at the age of twenty-two. This from In Memoriam: 

Are God and Nature then at strife,

   That Nature lends such evil dreams?

   So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life. (canto 55)

And humanity would soon find out via Darwin that nature isn’t so careful with the “type” or species, given that “More than 99% of all species that ever lived on Earth, amounting to over five billion species, are estimated to have died out” (“Species,” Wikipedia). Confronted with God's problem, Tennyson’s response was to ignore what nature logically implies about God’s goodness or existence (the rational  red pill) and make a (blue-pill) leap of faith that accepts both God’s goodness and existence, regardless of the logical conflicts between empirical facts and biblical claims, perhaps thinking he would be reunited with his friend Hallam in Heaven. Elsa doesn’t sidestep logical implications—that if God exists then “he” did a lousy job creating the world (thus is not all-powerful) and he doesn’t care about helping humans deal with evil (thus is not all-good). She simply accepts the tragic side of life. She is crushed by grief when her cowboy is murdered. The invaders (represented by the bandits) who kill are murderers; the defenders who kill the invaders are heroes. Thus, Ennis dies a hero.

The question of God’s problem comes down to if there is an all-powerful and all-good God, why is there so much evil and suffering. Why not have created a world populated by angels who are fleshless thus cannot suffer as humans and other life forms do? The follow-up question is what kind of God gives curious Eve who harmed no one a death sentence but forgave Cain who murdered his brother and tolerates so much suffering—especially big-time suffering caused by wars and plagues.

Answers from a Poet, Two Philosophers, Science, and Lao Tzu:

William Blake addresses the problem in two poems: “The Lamb” and “The Tyger.” “The Tyger” suggests that the reality of God is nothing like what people imagine—nothing like the lamb that symbolizes Jesus:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night; 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies. 

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat.

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp.

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears 

And water'd heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? 

In other words, maybe God is more sinister than his priestly representatives would have us believed. The Old Testament gives plenty of reasons for rejecting his image as a benevolent deity.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant suggests that God’s reality may be something not only beyond human comprehension but totally alien—scary alien. The ultimate origin of everything, Kant believed, cannot be known because the mind and senses organize reality for us, and it is impossible to go beyond our perception of reality to what it is in itself—the noumenal reality of the world we live in that is our origin.

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer took a stab at expressing Kant’s noumenon. According to Harald Höffding, Schopenhauer “breaks with the fundamental presupposition of a harmony of existence on which western theology and philosophy had hitherto... always been based.... Appealing to the experience of the sorrow of life—he lays down the principle that the innermost kernel of existence is blind, undisciplined” (A History of Modern Philosophy 214-215, vol. 2). There’s a little bit of Schopenhauer in Elsa. Actually, more than a little. The pessimist Schopenhauer loved life but saw its tragic side.

Science gets us much closer to the arché of our existence than Kant thought possible, to the original stuff out of which the world came to be. Nevertheless, ultimate reality still eludes science, but it knows enough to conclude origin of all things isn’t a benevolent, wise deity. Kant considered religions symbolic systems that were useful to keep order in society and perhaps to give blue-pill hope to people overwhelmed by the reality of life. There are characters in 1883 who feel that way as do the women of Paradise in Top of the Lake.

Genesis says in the beginning the world was without form. That is true. It was total chaos without the modicum of order the forces of nature provide because they didn’t yet exist. I say modicum because in his The Cosmic Landscape string theorist Leonard Susskind calls what goes wrong when gravity combines with the laws of physics a “grim tale” of “extreme violence” and that “Laws of Physics as we have understood them predict an extraordinary lethal universe” (61). Elsa's discovery of that fact is painful, and her response is heartbreak, not theoretical or philosophical. Genesis performs a deus ex machina with God coming to the rescue by organizing the whole mess into cosmos or order. Science knows what really happen: 

The Origin of Everything in a Nutshell

The Big Bang cataclysm generated space and time, as well as all the matter and energy the universe will ever hold.

Inflation cause a vast expansion of space filled with this energy and stopped only when this energy is transformed into matter and energy as we know it.

Basic forces emerged: first gravity, then the strong force, which holds nuclei of atoms together, followed by the weak and electromagnetic forces, creating fundamental particles/energy: quarks, electrons, photons, neutrinos, etc. and less familiar types. Smashed together they formed protons and neutrons.

Basic elements emerged when protons and neutrons came together to form the nuclei of simple elements: hydrogen, helium and lithium. 300,000 years later electrons would be captured into orbits around these nuclei to form stable atoms.

Birth of Stars and Galaxies emerged as gravity forces the dust to bunch together. More dust caused stronger gravity and hotter temperatures. Once hot enough, nuclear fusion reactions trigger a new star formation.

The Sun emerged from a huge cloud of gas and dust 9 billion years after the Big Bang and 5 Billion years before now.

Planets, moons, and asteroids emerged from vast disks of gas and debris that swirls around this new star.

Earth emerged when about 4.5 billion years ago when gravity pulled swirling gas and dust into a ball that became the third planet from the Sun. Like the other terrestrial planets it has a central core, a rocky mantle, and a solid crust.

Earliest Life emerged about 3.8 billion years ago as the Earth cooled and an atmosphere developed. Microscopic living cells (overlooked in Genesis) evolved and flourished in earth’s many volcanic environments.

Plants and Animals: Plant life began colonizing land 500 million years ago, around the same time as the emergence of the first land animals.

Lao Tzu tells us this about the origin of everything:

There was something formless and perfect

before the universe was born.

It is serene. Empty.

Solitary. Unchanging.

Infinite. Eternally present.

It is the mother of the universe.

For lack of a better name,

I call it the Tao.

It flows through all things,

inside and outside, and returns

to the origin of all things. (Tao Te Ching – Verse 25)

Chinese philosophy scholar Wing-Tsit Chan says this about this passage: “Taoist cosmology is outlined here simply but clearly. In the beginning there is something undifferentiated, which is forever operating; it produces heaven and earth and then all things.... At any rate, this naturalistic philosophy has always been prominent in Chinese thought...” (The way of Lao Tzu 25). The Tao is simply the way of all things. The Universe is self-emerging. Taoism should be treated as a philosophy, not as a religion.

God isn’t needed. Well, he is needed if you want the entire 14 billion year process to be all about humanity. What Elsa realizes is that nature isn’t all about humans. She says God didn’t make nature just for humans but for all of nature’s creatures. Of course, that contradicts Abrahamic scripture. What she means but can’t say is that nature didn’t create the world just for humans but for all creatures, though in fact nature creates without purpose.

In spite of nature's indifference to humanity, Elsa comes to realize is that what is created is magnificent (including humans such as Elsa and her family, friends, and lovers) and that humans are lucky to be a part of it. What Elsa doesn’t realize that her family and friends and the audience realize is that she is the quintessence of nature’s creativity. Contra Apostle Paul, she is pure beauty in the flesh, and her beauty glorifies the flesh. Paul cared nothing for beauty, neither did his people. Unlike for Greeks, Romans, and Native Americans, the creative arts were alien to them. He lavishes praise on the spirit, but being immaterial spirit is without form. That is why a thousand angels can dance on the head of a pin and why artists must give angels fleshy bodies.

The French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s painting of two angels carrying a soul to Heaven (A Soul Carried to Heaven) does this beautifully. And notice that the Frenchman paints the soul as a beautiful female. 

Bouguereau, like Sheridan, recognized the feminine as the central source of value in life—love, beauty, marriage, children, and family. Elsa embodies all of these. This is radically different from the God-centered, God-obsessed Abrahamic religions that in the pursuit of God turn away from life. Elsa represents not only the value of herself but the value of Earth, its creatures (especially her horse), and the Earthly way of life. There are no cowboys or cowgirls in Heaven.

The soul by definition is nonmaterial thus invisible. And that which is made of spirit (souls and angels) is without form; however, that which is without form logically cannot be beautiful. Thus, Paul could neither comprehend nor appreciate beauty. Elsa would mean nothing to him. She is the best of nature without the worst of nature. In that sense, she seems almost unnatural—thus especially precious. Yet, she is all natural, as the series makes clear. Yes, she is amazing, but everything in nature is amazing. Here is a simple example: two hydrogen (H) atoms and one oxygen (O) atom magically creates H2O—water, thus rain, snow, ponds, lakes, streams, rivers, and oceans. And oxytocin together with other hormones such as dopamine and serotonin combine to produce love—the primary theme of 1883. And don’t let the reductionists fool you. Love is as real as water. And like water love comes in many forms: romantic love, family love, philia love (friendship), selfless love (altruism), love of nature and her creatures, and so on with endless variations.  That’s amazing and no miracles are needed because that is what nature does on its own.  It is the way nature has given birth to new forms and ways of being for fourteen billion years. The Universe is a matrix of creativity.

Have I digressed from the topic of masculine feminism? Not at all. Elsa represents what good men value most—love, beauty, marriage, children, and family. The series makes that very clear with the men who love and protect Elsa: her father, the cowboy Ennis, Sam the Comanche warrior, and avuncular Shea Brennan. The series also makes clear that the world is filled with threats that require good men to assist and protect women, to create safe places where they can grow and thrive. And the greatest threat to women—to everything really—is bad men, represented by the male gangs of bandits. They are lawless, nihilistic, and threaten men, women, and children. In the 1883 Slavery and the Civil War are reminders of the horror immoral men are capable of creating.

In the series, bandits are more of a threat to wagon trains than they probably were historically. From the letters written by women who traveled on wagon trains (men were not letter writers) the greatest threats were accidents and illness. However, I assume the constant threat of vicious bandits is intended to represent the threat of bad men—criminals of all stripes—that are everywhere in the world we live in. In the U.S. women and everyone else are threatened by gangs, drug and human trafficking cartels, mass murdering shooters, rapists, child molesters, and masculine thugs of all kinds. In Europe Russian men on the orders of a lunatic have invaded Ukraine and murdered endless men, women, and children and have driven the women and children from their homes and communities by destroying their homes and communities.

Masculine aggression is a global threat and always has been. Thus, the need for good men to protect women, families, and communities from bad men. And that is what Native American men do in the series—act aggressively to protect their women, families, and communities from invaders. The irony, of course, is that masculine aggression seems the only means capable of countering masculine aggression. Morality is essential to guide good men; but as the series indicates, in a world of evil men morality must be enforced with violence. The fundamental issue recognized by both series is that the problem of masculine aggression is again like gravity—seemingly here to stay and unavoidable. Thus, without good men who are willing risk injury and death to confront evil men, there would be little hope for the preservation of what we value most in life because it is most vulnerable.

In conclusion, no man in the series represents the supreme values of life represented by Elsa—beauty, love, compassion, family, and children. She also represents a love of life and a love of simply existing in a world full of wonders. Of course, that love is found in men as well, in artists and poets and men like Taylor Sheridan. What the series says about the value of men is that they do not possess inherent value as women like Elsa do. To protect and preserve what Elsa is and what she represents is the raison d'etre of masculine existence. Protecting and preserving life, men become heroes. It is a yin-yang relationship. Without the feminine life loses its primordial meaning; without the masculine what the feminine represents cannot endure, cannot flourish. Good men and women need one another.