Feeling Forgot What Was Right
As Inspired By, and A Response To, Freya India
When in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Hero is slandered by Claudio’s accusations, Beatrice, the girlboss of repartee, breaks down in what is her most vulnerable moment for her cousin’s sake. In this state, her deep feelings, which she had so far buried, usually with jokes, wits, and repartee with Benedick, break to the surface; they cannot be hidden, and they pour. She is a woman after all. She mourns her cousin’s pride and asks Benedick, who loves her, to avenge Hero by killing Claudio. However, Benedick, although with great feeling for Beatrice, swearing that “I do love nothing in the world as well as you,” could not assent to killing Claudio. He agrees to challenge Claudio, not kill him. A different response from what Beatrice outrightly wanted. This article is something like that.
Make no mistake. Unlike with Beatrice and Benedick, I have no personal relationship with Miss India, whose article inspired my response. I have merely followed her work for two years, and have come to love her work addressing the issues troubling young women. I know no other contemporary writer who gives articulate airs to young women's struggles as she does. As such, I am no stranger to the passion in her recent article in First Things. Which, I suppose, everyone expects, ought to be met with articles that heed the theme and call-to-action that we should “argue from feelings” and speak to young women in a style and manner that they care about.
Unfortunately, like Benedick to Beatrice, despite my sympathy for the young women for whom Miss India writes, I fear I cannot do as is expected. That is, in this case, to argue from feelings or at least avoid the overreliance on argument and intellect. Because I have a different and counter thesis: what we are faced with is the crisis of disordered feelings, and order depends on intellect.
It is superfluous now to discuss how much feelings led us away from what was right. It is boring to belabour it. It is especially grievous and heartbreaking to consider it. How else can we demonstrate how feeling forgot what was right than to look at the modern self, which is nothing but expressive individualism, a self-originating source of valid claims operating by sola affecta. Children are mutilated because they feel; boys feel like they are girls trapped in a male container. Or sometimes because it is their mothers who feel and want to feel hip and caring; as such, they encourage their children to mutilate themselves through gender surgery.
Was it not feeling without reason which endangered unborn babies and has since become a seemingly alternative —if not a staple—to the normal way of life? So long as the gestating mother fears that perhaps gestation would put a speed bump in her career. And this is the ‘serious’ reason. There are still some more fleeting reasons for abortion, like wanting to be a free, independent woman unwilling to be robbed of her 20s, her peak years of partying and having fun.
It was feelings, was it not, that made people unable to speak the truth, let women glamorise divorce, and write magazine columns on how they felt caged and they just wanted to let loose and go explore? We lost all discipline through feelings. Up to the point of “Dying For Sex,” a miniseries inspired by a woman diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer who leaves her family to explore sex. And it was still feelings which made grown men, husbands and fathers, go the way of fulfilling their wish to live as women, abandoning their families while at it. Feelings have forgotten what was right and has done its damage. No more. At least, not in its disordered form.
Because, the opposition is not to feelings per se. But to disordered feelings. And disordered feelings are those removed from the truth of reality and being. It is feelings without reason. Therefore, if the right must recover feelings, it must be reordered feelings. This is their foremost task.
Both Chesterton and Scruton would agree with me on this. Because Chesterton, when asked what was wrong with the world, answered that, “What is wrong with the world is that we do not ask what is right.1” Summarising his preceding description of the
“scheme of medical question and answer; the first great blunder of sociology. It is always called stating the disease before we find the cure. But it is the whole definition and dignity of man that in social matters we must actually find the cure before we find the disease.2”
And this is what is wrong with the world. By failing to establish what is right before anything else, before any other inquiry, we cannot proceed rightly. We would botch most of our attempts even when made in good faith. As such, Chesterton declared that what was wanted was an unpractical man.
Scruton, too, in How To Be A Conservative, states that “Conservatism…attempts to understand how societies work, and to make the space required for them to work successfully.3” Echoing the same sentiments in Chesterton, but in a different form: it is only after we have understood how things work that we may begin ordering our households in a way that makes them work. This is true for feelings as well. As it is true for everything, as Russell Kirk, the father of modern American conservatism, said, “Order is the first need of all.4” Typified, of course, by the Biblical account of creation and Ovid and all creation accounts everywhere.
Conservatism’s first business is establishing order. Without which, feelings only intensify the existing chaos. And it seems to me that what the young women in Miss India's essay feel and truly feel are not just pains of loneliness, but the feeling of confusion in a world disordered, a world they cannot call home, because before a home becomes one, it must first be a house and a house is a structure ordered to shelter human beings. As she says, “Don’t we see that this world offers them no other sanctuary?” Where is a sanctuary is a consecrated space, and consecration is the act of ordering and offering an item to an ideal.
What “young women who just don’t believe anyone will stick around, who are terrified to start families because theirs fell apart” really seek and desire is order; as the author says, “I wanted vows and commitments. I wanted guidance and guardrails. I wasn’t cut out for a world that offered no refuge, no haven or hiding place, and I thought the problem was me. What they truly feel is chaos.”
I do not here wish to tell someone what they ‘truly feel.’ I simply appeal to our common rational nature, which lets us know that we are seeking happiness; and happiness is obtained when an appetite is fulfilled by the object it is rightly ordered towards. As such, Sir Roger wrote,
“To teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning ‘what to feel’ in the various circumstances that prompt them. The virtuous person, in Aristotle’s understanding, does not merely know what to do and what to feel: his life and actions are imbued with the kind of success which is the reward of rational beings, and which Aristotle described as eudaimonia, a term normally translated as happiness or fulfilment5.”
I can tell, as any keen observer can, that we are far from knowing what to feel.
Order is also therapy’s promise. Therapy is not only a vent for feelings. Rather, the ideal allure therapy provides is the promise of ordering one’s emotions and psychology towards moral and psychological recovery. We see this in the now-epidemic “therapy-speak,” which furnishes its adherents with language to articulate psychological problems; although most often without true transformation. The need for order, before anything else, is the first need.
If this is true, it means that the ‘overreliance’ on intellect and argument is befitting. For it is the intellect’s proper duty to apprehend the truth of being and communicate all the consequent faculties towards the truth and good of being. As such, it will be, no matter how well-intentioned, erroneous to “argue from feelings.” For it is not in the capacity of feelings to apprehend good and truth prior to or apart from the intellect. Before we appeal to pathos, we must first secure the logos. For “in the beginning, there was the logos.6”
I suppose this process of establishing what is right and recovering order may not seem as warm or sensitive to the plight of hurting women. As she says, “young women don’t care about that.” But I say that if indeed it is what is needed rather than what is merely wanted, then we must welcome the process with the minimal warmth it offers; just as we do with unpleasant medicines. If the art of medicine is anything to draw from, the worse the ailment, the less savoury the remedy. However, we endure it just until health is restored. Sometimes we are too sick to even know or want what we ought to want.
Even within religion—by this I mean Christianity, the true religion, right doctrine (orthodoxy) precedes right practice (liturgy/orthopraxy). Both precede right feeling (orthopathy). Right doctrine orders and directs our emotions, while liturgy (formality) heightens and focuses them.
Whereas wrong doctrine —powered by feelings— produces wrong practice and both exacerbate wrong feelings; just as Priestesses and female ‘bishops’ have tried all to make different things out of Christ; especially a Christ who never wields the whip. Who affirms sinners in their sin. The ‘Jesus’ who blesses and approves same-sex ‘unions’ and endorses those who say He put them in the wrong body. Because to do otherwise is not loving; where ‘love’ means having one’s feelings affirmed. As one commenter stated, “Christians have gone out of their way to try to pander to women.” This type flourishes in the non-denominational “Jesus Is My Boyfriend” typeface of the Christian religion, where Jesus is at best a surrogate boyfriend. Where even so-called complementarians —as opposed to egalitarians—are too timid and anxious to speak of male headship without hedging with a thousand mentions of “servant-leadership”, thinly veiling the subtext that the women run the ship, and the men, husbands, and fathers are simply figureheads.
Lastly, the author notes how “rows of suited men nodded along.” This is an observation I wish to not only emphasise, but also justify. To justify why it is mostly men. As one may say that the more impersonal style of addressing these issues is “male-coded.” It is male-coded to appeal to intellect, argument, numbers, charts, and statistics. It is male-coded to “recite ontological arguments and academic jargon, losing anyone without a philosophy.” As Chesterton too noted,
“There is a pedantic phrase used in debating clubs which is strictly true to the masculine emotion; they call it ‘speaking to the question.’ Women speak to each other; men speak to the subject they are speaking about. Many an honest man has sat in a ring of his five best friends under heaven and forgotten who was in the room while he explained some system. This is not peculiar to intellectual men; men are all theoretical, whether they are talking about God or about golf. Men are all impersonal; that is to say, republican.7”
And this is good, actually. For I argue that it is an essentially male-coded task to pursue order first and foremost. Without which, women will be displaced in their feelings, as is already happening. To understand this view of things, it might be helpful to start again from the beginning. From Genesis.
In Genesis8, the author lets us know that when God created man, He made them male and female. That is, at the time when God conceived mankind, He made them essentially male and female. Yet, God formed man first9. In ontological language, we might say God gave potency and essence to male and female at the same time. But He offered actuality and existence to Adam first, keeping the woman in the waiting.
I do not suppose that The Creator was clumsy. Rather, I have full confidence in His judgment that He ordered everything for a purpose, as seen in the order of events. For we know that when He had formed the man, He put him in the garden to work it and take care of it. In fact, “no shrub of the field had yet appeared on earth…for there was no man to work the ground.”
He then put the man in the garden He had planted, and brought all the animals He had formed to the man to see what he would name them, “and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name”; nomen est omen. In other words, the man was tasked with setting his first house, the garden, in order. Only while at this task does it become pronounced that the man was alone and without suitable help, and this was not good. God then took the woman from essence into actuality and existence.
Upon seeing her, he ruptures into ecstasy and comes for the first time to self-consciousness. And true feeling. Before the woman’s appearance, the man had no sense of the personal, only the impersonal. In this way, the woman became the organ of man’s self-consciousness and true feeling. This, however, was contingent on order: man must tend to the garden before he can come to self-recognition. We might as well say that the man was not permitted such deep feeling and self-recognition until he had done his task diligently. He was not allowed to utter the word “My”, and the woman was not allowed to appear to him until he set himself first to work in the garden.
This myth and archetype still speak true to our hearts today. The seeming impersonality of dry intellectual work required to reorder civilisation must precede true and deep feeling. Men, who typically make up the right, are still setting themselves, whether consciously or not, at the task of ordering the principles required to furnish the figurative house which we shall make a home. Without which we will have “a world where nothing is permanent, where no vows can be expected to last.” The way to give young women “a way of life that meets their instinctive needs and doesn’t make them feel anxious or insecure or needy” is by recognising “some principles of order by which to govern ourselves10,” which the young women may not care about. Which is why, like Benedick, who could not afford to give his beloved Beatrice what she asked for, I fear that what Miss India asks from the right and conservatives (and the church) is a hard task.
Insofar as all is without form and void; so long as there is a garden to be set in order, it might not be the best thing for the right and conservatives to give what young women so ask of them. It is a hard bet. It is not a matter of lacking sympathy or a loss of listening ears. But it is a matter of darkness being on the face of the deep. Without light, creation is not even possible. What is possible, however, is first the retrieval of light. And with light comes true warmth and feeling.
Truthfully, warmth makes a house a home. And conservatism is at its most honest, a love of home and hearth. But we will not get a home without a house. It is unwise to stay in the open cold, and seek warmth by hugging each other in a naked therapeutic embrace now and again. What we must do is let the men get to building the house. After which, we trust the women to warm up the emergent structure with the depth of feelings that God has invested in their supply. The right owes the women order, and the women owe the right their depth of warmth and feelings.
I encourage you to read
’s essay at First Things to properly enter the conversationWhat Is Wrong With The World, G.K. Chesterton.
Ibid.
How To Be A Conservative, Roger Scruton.
“Order, The First Need of All,” Russell Kirk.
Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling In A World Besieged, Roger Scruton.
John 1:1, “In the beginning was The Word.”
What Is Wrong With The World, G.K. Chesterton.
Genesis 1:26-28
Genesis 2:4-15
“Order, The First Need of All,” Russell Kirk.