From “The Scratching Post”: Sexual musings, Part 2

By Ken Marks

[Opening from the original on The Scratching Post, November 20, 2022, published here by permission of the author.]

The roots of the Modern Era of human sexuality are improbable and deep. They reach down into the heart of the Scientific Revolution, which began five centuries ago and lasted about two centuries. In this interval, the giants of early science lived—Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Christiaan Huygens, and Isaac Newton. Together, they swept away virtually everything the ancient Greeks had to say about the cosmos. The Earth lost its prestige as the center of all that is. Everything beyond the Moon’s orbit was once thought to be forever fixed, but thanks to the ingenuity of Dutch lens grinders, astronomers saw novae and comets deep in the reaches of space. They calculated that the paths of planets were elliptical, not circular. They discovered that the Moon’s terrain was uneven and mountainous, not smooth and polished as Aristotle had supposed. The Earth, always thought to be stationary, had to be moving through space at an incredible speed, and with it, its atmosphere and everything on its surface! Newton brought the revolution to its climax by explaining the movement of celestial bodies entirely in terms of mathematical laws. It was as if man had looked into God’s mind.
    One cannot have lived during this era without feeling unmoored. Recall that the Reformation had begun, and the Age of Discovery was well underway. The Catholic Church was buckling, and half the world was a fresh mystery. Descartes threw a lifeline to all of Europe—doubt everything, rely on reason, break problems into parts, solve the simplest parts first, submit your work to the scrutiny of others. The scientific method was launched, and the esteem for reason as a tool for good was secured.
    The question arose, how else might reason be applied? To society, to governance, and to economics, of course. These became the topics of discourse among educated and comfortable people. They spearheaded a new era, the Enlightenment, or, as I prefer, the Age of Reason. Among its leading lights were Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Nicolas de Condorcet, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Paine. These men were by no means unanimous in advocating for the rights of women. Rousseau, for example, wrote that women were subordinate to men and should obey them. But Locke disagreed, asserting that the notion of male superiority was a male fabrication. Condorcet advocated for female political equality, and Voltaire, on the death of his lover, wrote, “I have lost one who was my friend for twenty-five years, a great man whose only defect was being a woman.”
    Women entered the discourse about women’s rights through social venues, such as salons, coffee houses, and debating societies. Salons were held in private homes or hotel dining rooms. Though they were led by women with elite connections, women of lower classes and less education could attend. In fact, they often used a salon to socialize more widely and improve their educations. Coffee houses entertained a broader clientele. Some were run by women, and these did little to restrain the speech of their female patrons. Debating societies held their meetings in rented halls, and attendees paid an admission fee. At first, they were dominated by men, but eventually their gatherings became mixed-gender events and sometimes women-only events. Unlike salons, women participated as equals.
    Writing became an ideal occupation for many educated women. It was a way to express their minds and do so at their convenience and anywhere they liked. Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges wrote declarations and vindications of women’s rights, and Catherine Macaulay advocated for the education of women. Women in Europe and America had found their voices.
    From the early 1800s to the present, women have steadily worn down the bastions of male dominance in the West. I want to dwell on the events that were hammer blows to the status quo….
[Read the whole thing on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2022 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.

Thor's Day: Reflections on Galileo's middle finger

Authority versus independent thinking

By Morris Dean

My wife often tells me about the books she is reading. Which means that she's telling me about a new book roughly every week. But she most recently spoke more often and more excitedly than usual about Alice Dreger's book, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, and she devoured it in fewer days than usual, giving me too plenty of time to read it before the library wants it back.

Mitt Romney would not enlighten us

When it comes to the question I concluded by asking on Friday, How could belief in believing [that is, in faith as opposed to knowing based on evidence] have come to have such sway over Americans, we citizens of a nation born of Enlightenment political philosophy?, Mitt Romney pretty decisively identified himself as such a believer by this sentence from his religion speech:

Raised up over generations, long ago, so many of the cathedrals [of Europe] now stand as the postcard backdrop to societies just too busy or too 'enlightened' to venture inside and kneel in prayer.

Don't miss the significance of those quotation marks.

As Roger Cohen put it Thursday in his op-ed piece in The New York Times:

Europe’s cathedrals are indeed “so inspired, so grand, so empty,” as Mitt Romney, a Mormon, put it last week in charting his vision of a faith-based presidency. Some do not survive at all. The Continent has paid a heavy price in blood for religious fervor....

Romney, a Republican presidential candidate, was dismissive of European societies “too busy or too ‘enlightened’ to venture inside and kneel in prayer.” He thereby pointed to what has become the principal transatlantic cultural divide.

Europeans still take the Enlightenment seriously enough not to put it inside quote marks [emphasis mine]. They have long found an inspiring reflection of it in the first 16 words of the American Bill of Rights of 1791: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

...Bush is no transient phenomenon; he is the expression of a new American religiosity. Romney’s speech and the rapid emergence of the anti-Darwin Baptist minister Mike Huckabee as a rival suggest how estranged the American zeitgeist is from the European.

At a time when growing numbers of Americans identify themselves as born-again evangelicals, and creationism is no joke, Romney essentially pitted the faithful against the faithless while attempting to merge Mormonism in mainstream Christianity. Where Kennedy said he believed in a “president whose religious views are his own private affair,” Romney pledged not to “separate us from our religious heritage.”

...Religion informed America’s birth. But its distancing from politics was decisive to the republic’s success. Indeed, the devastating European experience of religious war influenced the founders’ thinking. That is why I find Romney’s speech and the society it reflects far more troubling than Europe’s vacant cathedrals.

Romney allows no place in the United States for atheists. He opines that, “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” Yet secular Sweden is free while religious Iran is not....

Oh yeah, we sure do want some more unreality-based political leadership, don't we?

Mitt Romney gives still others pause, but some not

Mitt Romney also gives pause to a couple of op-ed columnists, David Brooks and Gail Collins of The New York Times. Brooks (a Jew, and politically conservative) expressed his pause on December 7:

When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other’s passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn’t start this war, but speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people’s minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.

The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not....

Collins expressed hers the next day (December 8):

The peak of my sympathy for Mitt Romney came when he was being battered on one side by Christian fundamentalists who think his faith is a cult and on the other by fellow Mormons, who were irate when he fudged the fact that they believe Jesus will return to earth and build a new Jerusalem in Jackson County, Mo.

This week, Mitt made his much-anticipated religion speech, and stood up for his rights not to be discriminated against for his beliefs, and not to have to explain the part about Jackson County. Good for him on both counts.

... Except that you have to wonder why he felt compelled to dip into dogma just long enough to assure voters that he believes “Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.”

Romney’s message, which boiled down to "let’s all be religious together," was certainly different from the John Kennedy version, which argued that a candidate’s religion is irrelevant. But then Kennedy was speaking to the country, while Romney had his attention fixed on the approximately 35,000 Iowa religious conservatives who will tip the balance in the first-in-the-nation Republican caucus....

Of course, some were not given pause by Romney's speech. Here's one Mormon's assessment of it:

From what I heard, I see no reason that anyone would feel that Romney tried to separate believers from non-believers. Non-believers are just those that have not yet seen fit to believe. Hopefully all will believe prior to their judgment day.

Leaving aside the question whether I will ever again believe (whatever efficacy that could possibly have), I told her about some of the pauses that I and others had gotten from Romney's speech. She seemed incredulous, and I was surprised that she seemed much threatened by our reservations:

I cannot understand how any intelligent being can deny the creator of our universe. Refusal to do so seems to me to be following the devil, who got kicked out of Heaven because he wanted to force everyone to do his bidding instead of using his right that God gave him to make his own choices to do right or wrong. The people who choose not to believe should stop trying to force others to lose their right to believe....Why are the non-believers trying to destroy all evidence of God from our buildings and money? If the name is so bothersome, why don't they just stay out of those buildings and not spend any money that has "In God we trust" on it? I find the pressure to remove all trace of God from America shortsighted and repulsive. I am not going out of my way to change someone else's beliefs by destroying what is important to others. I would appreciate the same courtesy.

I'm still trying to make sense of this, still trying to understand how belief in believing (as opposed, for example, to moral behavior) could have come to have such sway over Americans, we citizens of a nation born of Enlightenment political philosophy.