Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Human Equality and the Silenced Woman

I wrote in “Intelligent Submission & Other Ways of Feminine Wisdom” (chapter 4):

All humans must be the same in some meaningful way for human equality to be a reality. Modern secular philosophers are very fond of the notion that all humans are inherently equal, but they cannot explain what exactly makes humans the same. They can only speak vaguely of X chromosomes, importance, and reason.[i] The X chromosome, for example, doesn’t make us particularly human for it is found in most animals. Incidentally, some evolutionary biologists reject a special human dignity because biologically humans and other mammals are closely related.[ii] But because it would be ridiculous to say that there is no difference between humans and animals, considering monkeys cannot build skyscrapers or compose symphonies, humans must be a distinct species of their own and possess therefore a special dignity of their own. As a foundation for human equality, however, dignity fails for it doesn’t make us equal; it is rather the other way around: we all possess a special dignity because we are the same.
In the twentieth century, reason became the great equalizer of humans in western philosophy. It was a natural choice since the assumed lack of reason was used as a foundation for inequality in the ancient Greek philosophy which stretched its influence all the way to the end of the Victorian Era. But because reason is possessed in degrees it makes us unequal in important ways. Albert Einstein and the toddler who watches Little Einstein are both human, but their ability to create elaborate scientific theories makes them unequal in an essential way. What is needed then is a trait all humans possess in the same degree. The body cannot provide such a trait, for everything that is material can be measured; the soul, however, can. Of all the traits the soul possesses, our ability to love is the only candidate that fulfills the criterion of degreeless universality. No, not the mushy kind of sentimentality you find in movies. Love is not an emotion, for you don’t have to feel good to do good. It is rather an inner attitude that causes you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise do, such as rid yourself of that long list of wrongs you have held onto for a decade. Love makes you feel happy about someone else’s success, it causes you to lend a helping hand to a stranger, and it makes you appreciate yourself as you appreciate those around you. It is not accidental that the two greatest commandments in the Bible enjoin us to love God with our whole beings and our neighbors as ourselves,[iii] for everyone knows how to love; we just forget sometimes and need to be reminded.

This is true of the equality which exists within the group we call “humanity.” But what about the equality of humans compared to those outside of the group? I.e. how do we, for example, distinguish humans from God? We know that God is spirit and without a corporeal body. We know also that God is omniscient and omnipresent, something humans are not. These traits make God and humans unequal, God being superior to us in more than one way. If we look around us, we find two other large groups that we can compare ourselves to: flora and fauna. That we are different from plants is self-evident, for plants grow where they are planted, receiving their nutrients from the soil, air (in the form of rain) and sun. Humans are mobile and must gather and grow their own food – which, incidentally, means eating plants. But what about the animals, especially mammals? Are we different in a fundamental way? Evolutionists say no, for we all evolved from the same amoeba. If we all share the same origin, we must be equal in a fundamental way. Yet, even the biologists must admit that humans are different in an important way, as seen in the above quote. But how, other than our ability to reason, do humans differ from animals? It is the human ability to speak that makes us unequal to the animals. Yes, animals “speak” in their own way, but only humans can communicate abstract thoughts using language as a tool. It is speech that makes all the complexities of human life possible. Take religion as an example: without speech, the Bible would never have been written - nor read.
Everything in the new creation was given a name which revealed the characteristic of the object. God called the day yowm (“hot, the warm hours”) and night layil (from luwl, “to fold back”). The earth God called ‘erets (“to be firm”); the sea, yam (“to roar”); herb, ‘eseb (“to glisten or to be green”); fruit, periy (“to be fruitful, grow”); morning, boqer (from baqar, “to break forth”), evening, ‘ereb (from ‘arab, “to darken”), creature, nephesh (from naphash, “to breath”); the bird ‘owph (from ‘uwph, “to fly”); animal, behemah (“to be mute”). For us animals are mute. We don’t understand the sounds they make. But if it is speech that separates us from animals, why should the woman be silent in the church? If the woman must be silent because she is by creation the man’s subject, she becomes by necessity an in-between form between animals and humans: since the woman possesses reason, she is not an animal, but the enforced silence lowers her artificially to the level of mute animals. The woman will share the man’s humanity fully only when she is no longer silenced. This was God’s plan from the beginning, for God created both the man and the woman in his own image – the foundation of our humanness.



[i] Coons, John E. and Patrick M. Brennan, By Nature Equal: The Anatomy of a Western Insight [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999], 25-33.
[ii] Messer, Neil, Selfish Genes and Christian Ethics: Theological and Ethical Reflections on Evolutionary Biology, [London, UK: SCM Press, 2007], 36.
[iii] Matthew 22.37-40

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