by Dr. William Pierce
I always have been very fond of women -- perhaps too
much sometimes. I always have enjoyed their company greatly. I have really
worshipped feminine beauty. I have admired and respected women when they have
served their purpose in the life of our people, as much as I have admired and
respected men who have served their purpose.
Having said this I must tell
you now that I believe that a great part of the present pathology of our
society can be ascribed properly to its feminization over the past century or
two, to its loss of its former masculine spirit and masculine character.
This came to mind most
recently when I saw and heard the reaction to Timothy McVeigh's statement to
the court on August 14, at the time he was sentenced to die. What McVeigh said
was very relevant, very pertinent. He said that the government teaches its
citizens by its example. When the government breaks the law, then its citizens
will not respect the law.
But the spectators almost
uniformly were disappointed by this statement. They complained that they wanted
to hear him say that he was sorry for what he had done, that he was sorry for
the innocent victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. They weren't even interested
in hearing about the much larger issue of government lawlessness that Mr.
McVeigh raised. They only wanted an apology for the suffering of individual
victims. This is a feminine attitude, this focusing on personal and individual
feelings rather than on the larger, impersonal context. It is a feminine
attitude, despite the fact that it was expressed by grown men.
Many other people besides me
have come to similar conclusions, although not all of them have wanted to come
right and out and say so, because that would be the height of Political
Incorrectness, the height of "insensitivity." As far back as the
1960s some perceptive commentators were remarking on the generally unmasculine
character of the young men they encountered in our universities. Male
university students even then tended to be too timid; too soft; too lacking in
boldness, pride, and independence; too whiny in adversity; insufficiently
willing to endure hardship or to challenge obstacles.
We have always had both soft,
dependent men and hard, proud men in our society, but the commentators were
comparing the relative numbers of masculine and non-masculine men they saw in
our universities in the 1960s with what they had seen in the 1930s and 1940s.
The 1960s, of course, were a time when the whinier men were making
extraordinary efforts to remain in the universities in order to avoid military
service, while many of the more masculine men were off in Vietnam, but this
isn't enough to account for the change these commentators noticed.
Something written by the
American historian Henry Adams back in 1913 was recently called to my
attention. Adams wrote "Our age has lost much of its ear for poetry, as it
has its eye for color and line and its taste for war and worship, wine and
women." Now, Henry Adams was a man who had much more than a passing
interest in such matters -- he was a lifelong student of these things and also
was a professor of history at Harvard back in the days when the professors at
that university were expected to know what they were talking about -- so we
ought to pay some attention to his observation of the state of affairs in
America in 1913. Incidentally, he was a member of one of America's most
distinguished families. He was a great grandson of the founding father and
second President of the country, John Adams, and a grandson of the sixth
President, John Quincy Adams.
Henry's brother, Brooks Adams,
had written a book 18 years earlier, in 1895, on the subject commented on by
Henry. It was The Law of Civilization and Decay, and in it Brooks made
an even more general observation than that stated later by Henry. Brooks saw
two types of man: the type he described as spiritual man, typified by the
farmer-warrior-poet-priest; and the type he called economic man, typified by
the merchant and the bureaucrat. I believe that Brooks must have known a
different breed of priests than those I am familiar with. He was thinking of
Martin Luther and Giordano Bruno, not Billy Graham and John Paul II.
He saw spiritual man as having
the leading role in the building of a civilization, with the economic men
coming out of the woodwork and assuming the dominant role after the
civilization had peaked and was in the process of decay. Spiritual men are
those with vision and daring and a close connection to their roots, their
spiritual sources. Economic men are those who know how to calculate the odds
and evaluate an opportunity, but who have cut themselves loose from their
spiritual roots and become cosmopolitans, to the extent that that offers an
economic advantage. The spirit of adventure and the current of idealism run
strong in spiritual men; economic men, on the other hand, are materialists. And
Brooks was referring only to European men, to White men. He was not even
considering the Jews or Chinese.
Most of us are a mixture of
the two types, and it's difficult to find examples of purely spiritual or
purely economic men. Michelangelo and Charles Lindbergh tended toward the type
of spiritual man. Pick almost any prominent politician today -- Bill Clinton or
Newt Gingrich, say -- and you have a good example of economic man. Which is not
to say that all economic men are politicians, by any means: just that, since
they are not likely to be distinguished in the arts, scholarship, or
exploration, politics is where economic men are most likely to find fame.
So what does this have to do
with the feminization of our society and the preponderance of whiny young men
at our universities today? Actually, these things are very closely
interrelated. They also are related to the things which caught the attention of
Henry Adams: the loss of our aesthetic sense, our warrior spirit, and our
feeling for what is divine, along with our masculinity.
When I say "loss," I
am using this word only in its relative sense. Our society still has masculine
elements, masculine characteristics; it's just that they are weaker now than
they were 200 years ago. And 200 years ago there were some effeminate tendencies
to be found; tendencies which today have become much more pronounced. It would
be an error, I believe, to attribute this shift in balance solely to the
machinations of feminists, homosexuals, or even Jews. They are responsible for
the condition of our society today primarily in the sense that the pus in a
ripe boil is to be blamed for the boil. The feminists, homosexuals and Jews
characterize our society in large part today -- they are symptoms of the
pathology afflicting our society -- but we must look deeper for the cause of
our decay.
Let me repeat Henry Adams'
observation. He wrote: "Our age has lost much of its ear for poetry, as it
has its eye for color and line and its taste for war and worship, wine and
women."
If he were writing today, he
might note that the immortal lyrics of his contemporary, Tennyson, have given
way in favor to the pretentious drivel of Maya Angelou; that the Western
tradition in art, which had culminated in the 19th century in the paintings of
Caspar David Friedrich and John Constable, has been shoved aside in the 20th
century by the trash-art of Picasso, Chagall, and Pollock; that the profession
of arms, which was still a more or less honorable profession in the 19th
century, a profession in which gentlemen and even scholars still could be
found, has become at the end of the 20th century a vocation for bureaucrats and
lickspittles, for men without honor or spirit; that worship, once taken
seriously even by many intelligent and sophisticated men, is now the business
of Christian democrats, with their egalitarian social gospel, and of vulgarians
of the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker stripe, with their television congregations of
superstitious, amen-shouting dimwits.
Can we properly describe this
change noted by Henry Adams as the feminization of our society? Or should it be
thought of as the replacement of aristocratic values by democratic values, a
general vulgarization of standards and tastes? Actually, these two ways of
looking at the change are related. But let me take Brooks Adams' position now
and say that the change can be attributed most fundamentally to the growing
materialism in our society, to the replacement of spiritual values by economic
values. What does that have to do with feminism or with democracy?
Actually, a great deal. In a
very broad sense, aristocratic values are masculine values, and democratic
values -- egalitarian values -- are feminine values. It is also true that, in a
very broad sense, materialism is a feminine way of looking at the world. It is
a way which puts emphasis on safety, security, and comfort, and on tangible
things at the expense of intangibles. It is not concerned with concepts such as
honor, and very little with beauty, tradition, and roots. It is a way with a
limited horizon, with the home and hearth very much in sight, but not distant
frontiers. Reverence and awe for Nature's majesty are unknown to the
materialist.
As spiritual man gives way to
economic man, when one historical era merges into another -- as idealism gives
way to materialism -- society gives a freer play to the feminine spirit while
it restricts the masculine spirit. Words gain over deeds; action gives way to
talk. Quantity is valued over quality. All of God's children are loved equally.
Pickaninnies are considered "cute" or even "adorable." The
role of the government shifts from that of a father, who maintains an orderly
and lawful environment in which men are free to strive for success as little or
as much as suits them, to that of a mother, who wants to insure that all of her
children will be supplied with whatever they need.
It is not just society which
changes, not just government, not just public policy; individual attitudes and
behavior also change. The way in which children are raised changes. Girls no
longer are raised to be mothers and homemakers but rather to be self-indulgent
careerists. Boys no longer are raised to be strong-willed, independent, and
resourceful. That requires hardness and self-denial; it requires masculine rule
during the formative years. A disciplined environment gives way to a permissive
one, and so the child does not learn self-discipline. Spanking becomes a
criminal offense. The child is not punished for disobedience, nor is he given
the opportunity to fail and to learn from this the penalties that the real
world holds for those who are not strong enough to succeed. And so boys grow up
to be whiny and ineffective young men, who believe that a plausible excuse is
an acceptable substitute for performance and who never can understand why the gratification
they seek eludes them.
The move from masculine
idealism to feminine materialism leads inevitably to hedonism, egoism, and
eventually narcissism. Henry Adams also claimed that we have lost our taste for
wine and women. Well, certainly not in the sense that we have become less
interested in alcohol or sex. What he meant is that we have lost the keen edge
of our appreciation for civilization's refinements, for the finest and most
subtle things in life: that our appetites have become grosser as they have
become less disciplined. Our interest now is in alcohol for its ability to give
us a momentary buzz, not in fine wine for its inherent artistry.
A similar consideration
applies to the way in which our taste for women has changed. And is this not to
be expected? It is the masculine spirit which appreciates woman, which
appreciates feminine qualities, and as this spirit declines, our taste for
women loses its edge and becomes coarser. We move from an age in which women
were not only appreciated but also treasured and protected into an age in which
homosexuality is open, tolerated, and increasingly common; Madonna is a
celebrated symbol of American womanhood; and feminine beauty is a mere
commodity, like soybeans or crude oil: an age in which parents dump their
daughters into the multiracial cesspool that America's schools and cities have
become to let them fend for themselves. In an age in which materialism and
feminism are ascendant, this is the only way it can be. To attempt to make it
otherwise -- to attempt to decommercialize sex, for example -- would be a blow
against the economy, against the materialist spirit. And to elevate women again
to the protected status they had in a more masculine era would be fought tooth
and nail by the feminists as a limitation on women's freedom.
This subject is a little
fuzzy, and I've been speaking qualitatively rather than quantitatively. For
almost everything I've said, an opponent could produce a counterexample. And
that's because I'm talking about very large-scale phenomena, involving many
people, many institutions, and many types of interactions. Even during periods
of history which I would characterize as masculine or as dominated by the
masculine spirit, one can find examples of feminine tendencies and of institutions
with a feminine spirit, just as one can find masculine tendencies in our
society today. For example, while I claim that our society is becoming more
effeminate today, someone can attempt to counter that by noting that
masculinized women are more prominent today -- female lawyers, female
executives, female military officers -- and one can attribute that to masculine
influences in our society. I would counter that by saying that when men become
less masculine, women become less feminine.
Likewise, when I relate
materialism and feminism, or when I say that the rise of the economic spirit is
associated with a decline in masculinity, someone else can find plenty of men
with no shortage of testosterone -- strong, aggressive capitalists -- who are
epitomes of what Brooks Adams called "economic man."
What it really amounts to is
that the masculine character, like the feminine character, has many components.
The component I have emphasized today is the spiritual component -- and there
are other components. It is a complex subject. But I still believe that we can
meaningfully describe what has happened to our society and our civilization
during the past couple of centuries as a decline in masculinity. I believe that
such a description sheds a useful light on one aspect of what has happened to
us. And I believe that Henry Adams' comment on our society's loss of its
artistic sense and of its sense of reverence, along with its warrior spirit, is
a generally true statement which has value in helping us to understand our
predicament. Adams, to be sure, was a scholar of considerable depth, and he
wrote a great deal of carefully reasoned material to support the one-sentence
summary which I quoted.
By the way, one subject with
which Henry Adams -- and his brother Brooks too -- were familiar in this regard
was the role of the Jew in undermining civilization. Henry made a number of
comments about the destructive role of the Jews in the economic and cultural
aspects of European civilization. His observations on this subject are perhaps
best summed up by something he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1896: "The
Jew," he wrote, "has got into the soul . . . and wherever he . . .
[that is, the Jew] goes, there must remain a taint in the blood forever."
How much worse that taint has become during the century since Henry Adams made
that observation!
I apologize for being so
abstract in my own comments today. But I believe that it's useful to back off
every now and then and try to see the big picture, to try to develop an intuitive
sort of understanding of our situation, even if it means talking about things
which are by their nature somewhat fuzzy.
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