Rationalism is Patriarchy
25 Nov 2024According to Wikipedia: “Patriarchy is a social system in which men typically hold authority and responsibility.”
Our living patriarchy is modeled after the structure of society in the Roman Empire, where the patriarchal pater familias “…was the oldest living male in a household, and could legally exercise autocratic authority over his extended family.”1 It is important to note that the Latin familia (root of the English word family) originally meant “a body of slaves,” though the pater familias’ authority was not limited to his slaves but also included his wife, children, and estate. In essence the pater familias concept was primarily about property rights, with the “father of the family” having both responsibility for and complete authority over his estate and the people living on it. As just one small example of this authority, the pater familias had the legal right to sell his children into slavery.
Fast forward to the modern world and one can see that we live in a society which is also structured primarily around establishing and protecting property rights. It seems there is no aspect of our society that cannot be turned into property. There is private property, public property, real property, investment property, and intellectual property. And even though, unlike in ancient Rome, we have abolished slavery, the so-called “human” rights are still conceived as an assertion about property. For example, we endlessly debate whether a woman’s womb, and the fetus inside, is the property of her person or the state.
But by agreeing to frame the discussion in terms of property, we have already consented to that particularly male view of life which divides the world into things to be owned via relationships of domination. It becomes a question of whose body, the woman’s or the fetus’, ranks higher in the hierarchy of power.
The deepest and most subtle root of this patriarchal view is the concept that the body is the property of the mind. This view separates our inner life into “sensory” experiences and “intellectual” experiences and positions the intellectual experiences as superior, establishing the “proper” relationship of mind as master and body as servant. In other words, patriarchy is based on belief in rationalism:
…rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory “in which the criterion of truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive.”2
In the Star Trek universe, the Vulcans are an alien species who are admired for their rationalism–their strict adherence to logic and suppression of emotion. They actually have more intense emotions than humans but have learned to completely suppress them in order to maintain a peaceful society. This is the ideological end-game of rationalism, a society which maintains an outer semblance of peace at the cost of continual and brutal inner warfare. Many plot points in Star Trek center on Vulcans hating themselves for failing to achieve kolinahr (the complete purging of emotion) or undergoing mental breakdowns and extreme fits of rage or anguish.
Today we have another term to describe the philosophy of Vulcans: toxic masculinity.
Because the story of the peaceful society of the Vulcans runs counter to what we observe in the real world. Before the Vulcans cut off their emotions, they were intensely emotional and war-like. But war, as we observe it in our world, is not perpetrated by an angry mob in a fit of rage, but by the intentional brainwashing of people to obey orders reflexively (the body) and the calm logical decisions of powerful leaders who direct these people to do their bidding (the mind). It is only under this rational framing that war has become so common, necessary, and unending.
The truth is that the barrier between the sensory and the intellectual is an artificial one. The body-mind experiences sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, sensations, and thoughts, and no attempted imposition of hierarchy and domination changes their interwoven, interdependent nature. Consider the inherent contradiction in the fact that the Vulcans pursue rationalism because they are afraid of being controlled by their emotions.
Only by embracing our lack of authority over our body and its experiences can we begin to free ourselves from the knots of patriarchal thinking that are tied around our mind. When we replace an attitude of domination towards our sensory experience with an attitude of care, when we stop identifying so strongly with the intellectual, we might see the world in an entirely different way. We might experience a sense of wholeness that is beyond rationality, that by virtue of including all our parts, is both rational and irrational at the same time.
If we want to dismantle patriarchy in the outer world, we must begin by dismantling the patriarchy within.