Certainly the feminist movement, by accident or design, has either been hijacked by or has morphed into Machine capitalism. The âliberationâ of women has often translated into the separation of women from their self-sufficiency, as men were separated before them, and their embedding instead into the world of commerce, whether they want it or not. Todayâs âliberatedâ woman is liberated from her home and children, who will be looked after by a paid stranger while she is out adding numbers to the gross national product like the men were before. âFreedom,â the highest prize, is always to be sought and won away from home, family and place.
My point is not that women should get back into the kitchen: it is that we all should, and into the other rooms of the home too. Machine modernity prized the men away from the home first, as the Industrial Revolution broke their cottage industries and swept them into the factories and mines, where their brute strength could be useful to the Machine.
Later, the women, who had been mostly left to tend the home single-handedly, were subject to the same âliberation,â which was sold to them as a blow struck against inequality. Perhaps it was, but it was also a blow struck against the home, for both sexes. In this context, the accelerating attack on traditional family structures, âgender rolesâ and more recently gender and biology themselves â while presented as yet more liberation from the tyranny of both tradition and biology â can also be seen as propaganda in the interests of the Machine. Making a home requires both men and women to set their own desires below the needs of the wider family â but this kind of sacrifice does not feed the monster. Only by unmooring the human being from his or her roots in community and place can the emancipated individual consumer and self-creator be born. Only by promoting the fulfilment of individual desire as the meaning of a human life can the selflessness that we once prized as a cultural ideal be transmuted into the selfishness that the Machine needs to thrive.
I thought about this most recently when I came across a BBC story about âthe limitations of motherhood.â Here we met the screenwriter of a new TV show, âThe Baby,â who explained how âexcitedâ she was âabout the possibility of exploding cultural ideals around motherhoodâ in her work. A true child of the culture of inversion, she explained how the traditional way of thinking about motherhood âreinforces the idea that âthe motherâ is cis, female, straight, middle-class, white, caring and nurturing.â
The job of writers like her was to âexplodeâ such outdated notions. Caring, nurturing mothers? Female mothers? Perish the thought. Could it be, after all, that motherhood itself is problematic?
It is, of course. To the Machine, biology and family and home and place and anything at all with borders and limits always will be. Reading that article took me back to the days when I had a TV and found myself watching an episode of the British current affairs blatherfest âNewsnight,â also courtesy of the BBC. Some talking head or other was arguing that the government should give all women the ârightâ â which sounded more like a veiled obligation â to put their newborn children into paid child care at just six weeks old and get âback to workâ to help âgrow the economy.â What the children might grow up to feel about this was never considered. Nor was the notion that any mother might be horrified at the thought. Liberation and profit, again, were proving a seamless fit.
Excerpted from "Home wrecker: Techâs war on the family" by British writer Paul Kingsnorth for Deseret News Magazine. As important as ever, given NYC Mayor Mamdaniâs attempt at building a pathway to universal childcare from just six weeks old so women can get "back to work" to help "grow the economy."
