In “More on the difficult relationship between human nature and sexual politics,” follow-up to the controversial “What are women for?” James Poulos turns from a final assessment of his own position, which he characterizes as relatively “modest and circumspect,” to speculation on the fate of the entire social conservative political project:
If my claim is doomed to be met with an avalanche of contempt, it seems likely that in our lifetimes social conservatism as we know it will be mocked, despised, and shamed right out of existence. You might be deeply uncomfortable with that even if you do hope to see an America without a social conservative movement.
For Poulos, it seems, and possibly for many of his readers, a world in which his initial question regarding women cannot even be broached would be a world in which social conservatism as we know it cannot survive.
Though Poulos is likely over-dramatizing here, at least as to the status of his own article as a qualifying test case and the response to it as definitive, there may nonetheless be some truth in this conclusion. From politically suicidal woman-related initiatives in congress, in the Republican presidential primaries, and in the states; to the death apparently by sheer exhaustion of one culture warrior, and the self-immolation of perhaps the most important one of all, with collateral damage everywhere, current events at least trace the outlines of a rout, and may even turn out to be a critical stage in one. Seen from a different perspective, though the “woman question” may not exhaust social conservatism – in the double sense of intellectually absorbing it in its entirety, and also of politically laying waste to it – it may be unintelligible, impossible to describe at all, without reference to so-called “women’s issues.” If so, then the woman question, in addition to being inherently a “man question,” would amount to a question of questions – not just a question on the social, cultural, or absolute and essential purpose of women or of the feminine, or on the purpose of gender roles or sexuality, nor even the possible purposes of political writing and thinking, but an onto-theological (philosophical and religious) question of a type that liberalism, broadly understood, seeks to and needs to exclude from politics, but that social conservatism understands as the very point of politics.
In addition to recalling emblematic scenes from post-modernist critical theory and its central precursors, this juxtaposition of incommensurable orientations toward political purpose itself (and therefore toward the juxtaposition itself) helps to explain a public discussion, or substitute for a discussion, with peculiar and paradoxical aspects: Its key terms seem too esoteric for conventional polemics, yet at the same time too threateningly and immediately constitute matters of life and death. Its key exchanges mark the absence of actual dialogue, as in Poulos vs the Avalanche, and do not and perhaps cannot constitute a discussion of the matter itself, but are instead a staging of collisions between symmetrical refusals of engagement.
The philosophically inclined blogger Ned Resnikoff seemed to be about to attack these issues, at these limits, when he gave his own Poulos-response post the amusingly recursive title “What Is the Question ‘What Are Women For?’ For?” Instead, perhaps hoping to set aside such complexities for as long as humanly possible, and quite understandably if so, he rested on an anecdote that let him associate Poulos with dismissably archaic views on gender. At the risk of overly personalizing this (non-)discussion, just like everyone else, I’ll submit my own struggle with the subject as further evidence of how intimidatingly hopeless it can seem: Perhaps for the same reasons that Resnikoff chose to deflect rather than to dive in, and that Poulos’ efforts, especially the initial one, were widely received as obscure to the point of impenetrability, yet worthy of intense criticism (and derision), or perhaps because any question of questions always discovers and overwhelms any observer’s limitations, and in a political context seems always on the verge of politically annihilating the analyst, I have found myself constantly on the verge of publishing my own response, or of giving up, never quite sure whether I was wasting my time and energy, yet suspecting that any turning away would immediately turn into a turning toward, all over again. As noted at the outset, current events seem to confirm that suspicion poignantly.
The substitution for and inversion of Poulos’s original question, the movement from one frame to another as traced in his two articles, may merely be convenient rather than absolutely necessary, but a re-formulation of the woman question as the social conservative question – not as a question about gender roles, nor even about the role of genders, but about a comprehensive political orientation – can allow for progress on matters whose direct connection to “women’s issues” are not always obvious, and that we do not yet appear ready to discuss anyway. I’ve numbered this post “1” because at this time I contemplate at least two more posts on this theme, one on social conservatism and the radical critique of modernity, the other on social conservatism in relation to social liberalism.
I don’t know if it will help you regarding the dilemma of whether or not you are wasting your time with this issue or whether it makes sense to move from one frame to another, etc, but my question about it is why would any even somewhat intelligent person willfully question things in that way? Is that what you’re asking too? And really? Does social conservatism really rest on the right to ask that stupid of a question? If so, I say let it die. And while I understand that social conservatism itself means having never to say you’ll change, doesn’t even a group defined by its disinterest in change have to accept some standard of human intelligence? If you have to ask what women are for–if that question must be asked by you–then why not also have to be able to ask what Jews are for, and what kings are for, and what Eskimos are for, and what Russians are for, and Africans are for, and what fantasy humans in sci-fi movies are for? I would say that if this group is really defined by its right to be stupid, then what we are losing if it dies is not the social conservative movement, but the social stupidity movement. I want conservatives to exist. I see a point in conservatism. I don’t see the point in willful stupidity. Do you?