Paralysis by pluralism

Examining records of internal issues of the NATO in the early 1960’s exposes an array of problems plaguing a democratic system: while the U.S. was driving towards its goal of resolving East-West tensions, national and prestige interests of other members prevented a consensus that would bring about tangible results. Especially the veto power of countries with a vested interest in the status quo, such as France and the FRG, de facto paralyzed the democratic decision-making process within NATO. No wonder, then, that the U.S., the country that stood to gain the most from a settlement of the East-West antagonism - or the most to lose if it were maneuvered into a nuclear conflict - was tempted to side-step the utter ritualistic inefficiency of multi-party “consultations” within NATO and to reach out directly to the principal adversary, the Soviet Union. While Dwight Eisenhower did not dare antagonize the allies by pursuing bilateral agreements with the Soviet Union, the Kennedy administration routinely failed to consult NATO before undertaking binding steps with Moscow.

One example of how frustrating the inefficiency of NATO procedures was with regard to decision-making even in emergency situations was its response to the Berlin Wall crisis: It took NATO a full three months to agree to negotiate at all, and six months after the erection of the wall the alliance had still failed to agree on a common position, not to mention come up with any actionable solution. To be sure, it criticized the only party that had done anything at all: the U.S.’ moving of tanks up to the newly closed Berlin border.  The paradox of this situation cannot be underestimated: it had been the U.S. who, with the Soviet Union, had won the war and carried the heaviest burden of the campaign against the Nazi Germany that had already conquered almost all of Europe by 1941. And yet the U.S. admitted not only Britain, but also France, a country that had hopelessly surrendered after putting up only nominal resistance to the German onslaught, into the Four Powers council that kept the lands of the Nazi aggressors occupied after what had ultimately been exclusively an Anglo-American and Russian victory. That handed inordinate power to a country that did not have much if any military or economic background to justify such standing, and Charles de Gaulle took France’s new position quite literally to extort even more far-reaching accommodations from NATO, even insisting on a tripartite directorate within the statutorily democratic structures of the North Atlantic Alliance.

Within NATO, smaller countries without much international relevance at the time, such as Greece or Turkey, suddenly also gained strategic importance and promptly exploited their newly acquired voice and significance by obstructing the initiatives of their larger partners and by siding with whoever seemed more promising to them from time to time in terms of their domestic political interests. While Christian Nuenlist in his article “Into the 1960s: NATO`s role in East–West relations, 1958–1963” in Transforming NATO in the Cold War. Challenges Beyond Deterrence in the 1960`s unabashedly criticizes de Gaulle’s obstructionism within NATO and his conspiring with the FRG to sabotage NATO policies and any European settlement, Andreas Wenger’s “NATO`s Transformation in the 1960`s and the ensuing political order in Europe” in the same volume brings up one redeeming quality of de Gaulle: the Frenchman did insist on an all-European governance of European affairs and at all times supported an early vision of a European Union. How unfeasible and, in fact, hypocritical such attempts were, is, of course, another story. At a time when Western Europe needed U.S. military assistance to deter a real or imaginary communist threat, relegating the liberator and peacekeeper of Europe to a status of a rank and file vote in NATO while expecting her to bear most of the military and economic burden must have sounded absurd enough in Washington. But to suggest running European affairs by excluding the U.S. from material decision-making was as downright incomprehensible as it was unrealistic. Sure enough, Franco-German domination of Europe must have appealed to nationalistic elements in both of these countries, but hoping that NATO members could eventually be coaxed into such an arrangement seemed like a political day dream taken the proverbial step too far. It seems that many of the Soviet-induced tensions actually helped unify the position of NATO members by compelling them to put aside assorted national ambitions that threatened to fracture NATO and, in fact, endangered its very existence.

Undated declassified NATO documents presented in the Harmel Report vividly reflect the alliance’s paralysis by pluralism: while criticizing the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in ever harsher terms, NATO provided precious little guidance as to what actually should be done to solve the problem of persisting East-West tensions. Aside from noble and high-minded sounding propaganda, the primary documents provide not only no vision for a workable solution, but also show no road map out of the impasse: they repeat the diagnosis that “there does not exist a magic formula for overcoming the division of Germany,” but also that the allies should nevertheless solve their internal differences before attempting to engage in any talks with the Soviet Union. Consequently, these documents repudiated any East-West summit as “premature.” That and the calls for the creation of new pro-forma bodies to “study the problem” shows that, in spite of all its rhetoric, NATO was not interested in overcoming the division of Europe at all, while taking all the credit for Soviet attempts toward a rapprochement. The only concrete change reflected in the documents is a gradual move from multilateral to bilateral negotiations and relations between member countries of the two blocs. Furthermore, leaving the question of reunification of Germany to the FRG’s discretion virtually guaranteed that the matter would not be resolved, thus predictably preserving the status quo of a divided Europe, since the enduring inflexibility of the FRG’s policies in that regard was known only too well. Other new elements in the presumably later document were unsubstantiated hints at a peaceful coexistence between the two political systems.

Vojtech Mastny’s overview of “The Warsaw Pact as History” in Cardboard Castle?: An Inside History Of The Warsaw Pact, 1955-1991 enumerates analogies to the internal struggles faced by NATO: Romanian obstructionism, Albania’s expulsion from the Warsaw Pact, and eventual reforms within the pact aimed at a democratization of the organization, as well as an improved consultation procedure, reflected similar challenges and evolution within NATO. Interestingly, while during détente NATO gradually changed its priorities from military ones to the dual mandate of deterrence and détente whilst acknowledging the close interconnection between military and economic interests, the Warsaw Pact’s role that had been political at the outset turned into an increased military significance, which in consequence became important for its newly heightened political impact. Also, the Soviet Union’s initial efforts at disarmament by reducing its conventional troops and by pursuing non-aggression treaties were mirrored only partially and much later by NATO’s admission in the Harmel Report that reducing the existing excessive military potential might serve an economic purpose.

The improved consultation procedures within the Warsaw Pact took an interesting turn, as one can read in Csaba Békés’ “The History of the DEFOMIN Collection”: while at first Soviet intransigence and later Romanian obstructionism stalled until 1976 János Kádár’s proposal made in July 1963 to establish a Council of Warsaw Pact Foreign Ministers, the informal and never institutionalized meetings of deputy foreign ministers took on an active role in negotiating a common foreign policy of the Soviet Bloc and served as a forum for the flow of information within that bloc. The efficiency of such ad hoc solutions proved that practical considerations often overruled policy based on the official party line and, without endangering the public posture of the Soviet Union as the official voice of the Eastern Bloc, provided for nascent democratization of the decision-making process and an increasing individual role accorded to the countries of Eastern Europe.

This trend was ultimately reflected in the Warsaw Pact Summit of January 7, 1970 that dealt with the response to the election of Willy Brandt as chancellor of the FRG. At the summit, various countries of the Soviet Bloc presented opinions that were certainly not unified and reflected mostly domestic interests, while Brezhnev’s comments tried to interpret them in the framework of official Communist policy. Still, and despite paying lip service to ideology, it seemed that the economic considerations of foreign trade proved to be the most important and ultimately decisive factors for the East Bloc’s opening towards the FRG’s Ostpolitik over the protests of the GDR that continued to worry about the continuing uncertainty of its status.

Appearances and reality in superpower negotiations

Although nominally discussing the same events of the Cuban and Berlin crises of the early 1960’s, the corresponding passages by both Wilfried Loth in Overcoming the Cold War: A History of Détente, 1950-1991, and by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali in Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary exhibit so much bias towards their respective political leanings that both read like timelines of very different events. It seems that post-WWII history, especially the history of the Cold War, still has so much emotional impact that a dispassionate account of the events is rather difficult to achieve even by accomplished scholars.

1956: Poland versus Hungary, and Suez for good measure

Developments in the Cold War associated with the 1956 events in Poland are frequently lumped together in historical analyses with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. However, the differences between them could hardly have been greater.

Efforts at peace or plain power struggles?

In The Cold War after Stalin's Death: A Missed Opportunity for Peace? (The Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series) historians discussing policies pursued by Dwight Eisenhower before the First Détente between Western superpowers and the Soviet Bloc often presume with the benefit of hindsight that he could have done more to bring about détente earlier, and criticize various “missed opportunities” which may or may not have resulted in an amelioration of East-West relations in the first place:

Justification of human sacrifice in body and mind

In view of the early internal communist documents such as the minutes of meetings leading up to the formation of Cominform, and especially the rhetoric of Zhdanov, it is not surprising that the internal balance, or, rather, imbalance of power in the Warsaw Pact took shape as one can observe from today’s perspective of the partly declassified documents and from the memoirs of their participants.

Does propaganda require a rationale – or even a point?

The minutes of meetings in Szklarska Poręba, Poland, in September 1947 that lead to the establishment of Cominform (Communist Information Bureau or the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers' Parties) make fascinating reading. They provide a glimpse into the farce of an independent communist government.

Governmental priorities

For a Pole or especially a Polish-American holding a romanticized vision of Poland’s past, The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland,1943-1948 by Krystyna Kersten makes for illuminating reading on many accounts. Perhaps the most striking element in Kersten’s text was the difference in Polish attitudes at the time towards Soviet hegemony as compared to the policies of other Soviet Bloc countries described by Tony Judt’s “The Coming of the Cold War” in Postwar: a History of Europe Since 1945. To be sure, Poland did, of course, have a notoriously long history of military and political conflicts with Russia. And yet, the insistence of the Polish government-in-exile on a negotiating policy ruling out any compromise with Stalin that was backed by virtually no support seemed to border on the delusional, or it appeared to be at least thoroughly misguided.

One might argue that the only alternative of the Polish government-in-exile in 1944-45 was to surrender unconditionally to Stalin’s demands both on the account of Soviet territorial claims and with regard to the ruling political system, so protests and an unwavering stance were the only way to save at least some face in the defense of Polish political independence. However, Stalin did not need to state any claims whatsoever – he was in supreme control of the sole army that was able at the time to thwart what appeared then to be a practically unopposed German expansion across Europe, and he was head of state of the country that was, as a matter of fact, going to liberate Poland from German occupation. His way was the only way that Poland was going to be, except for certain blatant outrages that would mobilize the Western countries in the name of political propriety. Still under German occupation, and later only partly “liberated” by the Soviets (who, of course, stationed sufficient troops east of the Vistula river to turn the facts on the ground into another occupation), Poland was in no position to pronounce any territorial claims or demand any assurances of political nonintervention.

Furthermore, the Western Allies had more important problems than the issues of one country to which their powerful partner in the ongoing war effort had already laid a claim. The unending, unsupported hopes of the Polish government-in-exile that the allies, who throughout the preceding five years of war had done precious little to assist Poland, would now take a determined stance against Stalin’s territorial and political claims in Eastern Europe and thus jeopardize their own hopes for an acceptable balance of power in Europe – all this can only be attributed to lofty idealism akin to naïveté.

Especially debatable is the Polish government-in-exile’s decision to start the Warsaw Uprising at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives just to deny the Soviets historical credit for being the liberators of their capital – and yet counting on the Soviets to join in the Polish effort, finish the work, and then hand the country to the Polish government-in-exile on a silver platter. The outcome was abundantly clear from the outset to all but the Poles themselves: “They were, in my eyes, the doomed representatives of a doomed regime, but no one could be so brutal as to say this to them…” as one of the Western diplomats in Moscow, George Kennan, put it blatantly. The decision to commence in 1944 a large-scale unilateral military action in Warsaw without consulting the Allies not only irritated the latter, but it also showed that the government-in-exile of a disbanded country tried to assert its importance without any regard to human sacrifice, and to force its allies into action by humanitarian pleas. That, however, could not happen to any significant extent in the larger geopolitical scheme of the time, especially in the face of Stalin’s stark opposition; his policy was to watch the remaining Polish combatant elements and underground government formations bleed to death. These unexpected events foreseeably made it all that much easier for him to carry out a thorough sovietization of Poland after the war.

Also, the government-in-exile’s insistence on the Polish Home Army behaving as “hosts” welcoming the Soviet Army even in face of evidence that all thus identified Home Army officers became instant subject to NKVD persecution, including summary executions and deportations to KZ Majdanek, is further proof of the desperate and utterly unreasonable attempts to assert the authority of a government safely ensconced in London – once again without regard to human costs on the ground. Especially when it became clear that the PKWN effectively took control of Poland and was organizing a functioning government from within Polish territory, the insistence of the Mikolajczyk government on maintaining international relations and continuing “negotiations” both with the Western Allies and with Stalin showed an ostrich attitude of outright denial of political reality. And later, Mikolajczyk’s disbelief in the sheer ability of communist activists to organize a functioning government and to rule Poland, even with assistance from Soviet cadres, presupposing some inevitability of the communists having to ask his government “for help,” evidenced a truly fatal under-appreciation of his most dangerous political opponents. The truly sad part is that, even when Stalin’s active support for Polish communists became abundantly clear, the government-in-exile could not agree on any feasible policy and engaged instead in patriotic rhetorics and mutual accusations, splitting itself into factions, and becoming so entangled in those internal ideological intrigues that it did not notice history passing it by at a distance – even forty years later, the self-appointed branches of a government without land or subjects refused to acknowledge the fact that Poland was, in fact, being ruled by communists, and that, like after a revolution, there was just no restoration in the cards for the ancien regime.

The position of countries such as Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria at the end of WWII contrast starkly with the lofty attitudes of Poland. Most countries in Eastern Europe recognized the fact that they were simply too weak to survive on their own, and actively sought allies and protectors to ensure their economic and political viability. Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, not to mention Albania, were not above the idea of merging into a federation to avoid marginalization and to strengthen all domestic political parties. Their different attitude might also be due to the fact that, throughout recent history, countries like Bulgaria or Yugoslavia had used the power of negotiation in the face of otherwise inevitable defeat in a potential conflict; this might have helped them to avoid significant losses both in economic and in human terms. Thus, Bulgaria had initially been allied with the Axis, but on September 9, 1944 it enthusiastically welcomed its Soviet “liberators” (although it bears mentioning that the population had been solidly Russophile at least since Alexander II had liberated Bulgaria from 500 years of Turkish occupation.) Joining the winning side helped small Bulgaria avoid to a significant extent the human costs associated for Poland with further resisting otherwise invincible totalitarian governments, and apparently even its archaic political system or its monarchy maintained by a German dynasty was not an impediment to developing friendly cooperation with the Soviets. The last king, Simeon II of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, even returned to the country 1990 after the fall of communism and served 2001-2005 as the democratically elected prime minister, though obviously his monarchy was not restored despite some notable support. It begs the question whether Poland could have obtained similar concessions if the government-in-exile had acquiesced to Stalin’s demands instead of maintaining entirely unreasonable stipulations when every other significant Western political power, including the US, knew they were outright impossible to implement – and tried to mitigate and coax the seemingly incurable Polish national pride into a measure of cooperation.

Yugoslavia’s situation was different in many respects, starting with the fact that it had expelled the Germans on its own and had introduced communist regime by democratic means without Soviet military intervention. It thus gained enough negotiating power with the Soviets to first become Stalin’s poster child and, after Stalin’s condemnation of Tito’s unsubordinated independent policies, including foreign relations often at odds with Stalin’s plans, Yugoslavia was banned from the Stalinist camp but was still basically left alone to work out its own version of communism. Economically, this worked to Yugoslavia’s advantage, since the economy was not drained by constant demands to support the largely inefficient Soviet central planning bureaucracy: Yugoslavia was considered the “rich aunt” of the Eastern Bloc, at least by average citizens of “brother nations” lucky enough to travel there and compare Yugoslav living conditions.

Another interesting aspect of Tony Judt’s overview is the methodology of the communist’s assumption of power in their target countries. It is impossible not to notice that, while in 1946-47 communists accused their opponents of fascist allegiances, the political methods used by them were identical to those used by the Nazi’s power grab in Germany more than a decade earlier. Especially the example of Hungary shows the vulnerability of democratic institutions in the face of takeovers by totalitarian or authoritarian rogue parties. It also seems that Stalin’s insistence that communist parties in the West should adopt aggressive methods without significant Soviet support intended precisely the inescapable results such actions had: the alienation and marginalization of Western communists, and thus the preservation of separate spheres of influence for East and West to which he had agreed at Yalta.

It is also difficult not to notice how territorial claims of various governments and the political ambitions of party leaders disregarded individual tragedies that resulted from mass deportations, expulsions and exchanges of ethnic minorities, even if the population in question was of their own nationality. In that regard, and no matter the government (or indeed regime), territorial ambitions eclipsed any considerations for the affected populations that may have existed: the territorial disputes of Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia present just some of the examples of the claims and counter-claims that reemerged in the early years following WWII when almost every country, conquered or liberated, tried to settle certain of its territorial ambitions by appealing to the allied powers engaged in the redistribution of the spoils of war by redrawing the borders in many parts of Europe.

One might agree or disagree with the policies of a ruling government, especially when it comes to foreign policy and territorial claims. However, a line needs to be drawn somewhere when the pursuits of national “prestige” – or rather, as it almost inevitably happens, of its ruling elites – take clear precedence over the basic well-being of the citizenry whom government officials purport to serve. 

Reservations of an observer in the gun control (dis)information wars

A recent talk given by John Lott at Fordham University left the audience including myself mildly to moderately stunned: who knew that one of the main arguments used by the Obama administration to push for changes in gun control policy consists of nothing short of blatant prevarication, and that the introduction of gun control laws almost inevitably resulted in murder rates skyrocketing all around the world?

Prevarications, of course, or rather the twisting and spinning of the facts appear to be a sin committed just as heartily and frequently on both sides of the gun control debate. And, more importantly, if we are to borrow Bernie Madoff’s now-immortal phrase, “there is no innocent explanation” for it all.

According to John Lott, the numbers used recently by President Obama as he was urging for increasing gun control laws and zealously repeated by Vice President Biden and the news media are simply incorrect. For example, their claim that “over the last 14 years [background checks] kept 1.5 million of the wrong people from getting their hands on a gun” suggests that as many criminals were denied a gun permit, and hence a possibility of buying a gun.  One might wonder why convicted criminals would even bother applying for a legal gun permit, considering that, first, they are not going to get one issued anyway, and second, that the black market in firearms is alive and well and nothing short of thriving. Lott clarifies that the quoted “1.5 million” reflects the number of initial denials, which are due to systemic errors and are in fact false positives overturned upon review in 94% of the recorded cases. A second round of review reduces the numbers of denials even further, to 0.1%. In 2010, this 0.1% translated into all of 63 cases of an initial denial of a gun permit warranting formal prosecution, which in turn resulted in a grand total of 13 convictions nationwide. Applying very basic math, one might try to extrapolate the 2010 numbers to arrive at some 182 convictions or 882 cases of prosecution over 14 years. Even if the estimated figures were ten or even a hundred times higher, they are still nowhere close to “1.5 million of the wrong people [being kept] from getting their hands on a gun.”

Of course, no one can realistically estimate how many people have been actually discouraged from considering the (legal) acquisition of a firearm by the administrative hassle associated with securing a permit and going through a background check.

Lott points to another apparently misleading statement of President Obama that was repeated widely by the media: “As many as 40 percent of guns are purchased without a background check.” This understandably alarming number is materially incorrect in various ways. First, the actual number in the original 1997 National Institute of Justice report based on a 1994 study was 36%, not 40%. However, the study accounted for 36% of transfers conducted without background checks, not 36% of sales. Transfers included also gifts, lottery winnings, swaps, and inheritances. The number of sales proper conducted without a background check actually amounted to 11-15% according to Lott.  One might wonder why other types of gun ownership transfers, such as inheritances, gifts, private sales, or raffle prizes, should be excluded from background checks in the first place. In that case, using “sales” to refer to “ownership transfers” would appear to be an innocuous slip of tongue in the President’s speech.

However, Lott also directly questions the relevance of the study cited. It had been based on voluntary telephone survey responses of just 291 gun owners (the pollsters attempted to contact 2,568 adults but obtained only a 44-59% response rate; the number of actual gun owners successfully contacted in this fashion was understandably much lower); the majority of the transactions examined by this study was conducted before the Brady Act entered into force that mandated background checks; cheap and easily available gun sale licenses at the time made many of the transactions in question appear to the parties as informal, rather than official sales subject to federal regulation. In other words, those 291 respondents described what they believed to be the case, not necessarily what was, in fact, the case.

But the Obama administration surely could have found a more reliable study to support a policy proposal that was perceived as bringing about significant social change in a constitutionally sensitive area, could it not?

No, it could not. And here is why:  in 1996, the Congress, working with the NRA, banned the use of funding by the Center for Disease Control of any gun-violence related research and thereby eliminated the main source of funding available for this kind of studies. As a readily foreseeable result, annual spending on any kind of gun-related studies dropped from $2.6 million a year to a mere $100,000 per year; peer-reviewed research on gun studies dropped by 60%; there are currently only about a dozen US-based researchers who focus on gun violence at all. No wonder that, as of today, there is no data answering important questions: how many guns exist in the US; how gun ownership correlates with crime; and how gun ownership is correlated to non-crime-related deaths, such as suicides. A recent executive order by President Obama directing the Center for Disease Control to resume gun-related research may hopefully remedy this scandalous void on critical information – unless this ‘need to know’  it is somehow thwarted yet again successfully by the NRA lobby on “budgetary” or “procedural” grounds.

Considering the utter lack of almost any reliable data concerning the situation surrounding guns in the U.S., it is no wonder that studies such as those presented by John Lott in his book More Guns, Less Crime raise lots of controversies. Lott’s results that were obtained through regression analysis (so elegantly presented as graphs during his talk at Fordham) as well as other aspects of his methodology have been contested widely on a plethora of grounds by scholars such as Dan A. Black and Daniel S. Nagin and most notably by Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue,  but they have also found support by Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley.

In the end, without reliable data we simply cannot draw meaningful conclusions that would not be based merely on our emotional responses to the controversial issue of gun control. This is why removing the ability of Congress to manipulate original research and data gathering by means of pulling purse strings is so important.

Let me conclude with a quote of former Chief Justice Warren Burger commenting on a new legal interpretation of the Second Amendment, calling it “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”’

But that is a topic for an altogether different discussion.

A Brief Vademecum on Phallogocentrism: Philosophy’s Apophthegmata on Women

At least three thousand years of traceable voluntary use of the human intellect have yielded a modest but not altogether insignificant harvest on the most enduring challenge to cerebral cognition: women. 

Not all proponents of a view cited herein may qualify as philosophers in an academic sense, although all believe they do, as all are male. Rather than indulge the almost irresistible temptation to interpret and comment, we should let great men speak unmistakably for themselves, in their own words. Right off the Aegean cradle of philosophy, one can observe their figure skating on the thin ice of reason.

With Trojan and Peloponnesian wars safely behind them, and even the subversive Lysistrata insurrection put down safely – reportedly, Aristophanes got tenure at the Prytaneion for that one – now unemployed Hellenic heroes fixed their gaze onto philosophy. Of course one of the most stereotypically offensive things about Greek philosophers is their incurable belief in duality and opposites. It started with Pythagoras and has not ended yet just because the International Monetary Fund or German taxpayers wish it would. But even before the conjecture of a “Greek Budget” was first proposed – by Roman tax collector, no doubt – it must have been approved by a “democratic” legislature and voted on exclusively by men. Such were the results history has handed down to us:

“A Man is best off with a nonentity – a woman who sits in the house useless in her stupidity. I hate clever women. I don’t want a woman in my house thinking more than a woman ought to think, because Aphrodite inspires more mischief in the clever ones, while a helpless woman is freed from folly by the simplicity of her thoughts.”

Euripides. Hippolytos, 638-644 (480-406 B.C.E.).

Socrates, for one, drew a somewhat finer distinction between domestic specimens and fine imports. He plead guilty to having studied rhetoric from Aspasia of Miletus, the lover of Pericles (Plato, Menexenus) and to have been taught erotics by the priestess Diotima of Mantinea (Plato, Symposium). Despite a great many mitigating circumstances sufficiently evidenced by his marriage to Xanthippe, we know his sentence by a jury of his peers. That lesson stuck, and it did not go unheeded by his disciples:

“It is the best for all tame animals to be ruled by human beings. For this is how they are kept alive. In the same way, the relationship between the male and the female is by nature such that the male is higher, the female lower, that the male rules and the female is ruled.”

Aristoteles. Politica. ed. Loeb Classical Library, 1254 b 10-14.

"Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own." 

Aristoteles (384-322 B.C.E.)

Thankfully Menander, his contemporary, grasped the educational as well as the ontological nexus of the subject with zoology:

“A man who teaches a woman to write should recognize that he is providing poison to an asp.”

Menander. Synkrisis. 1.209-210. (341-290 B.C.E.)

As a First Amendment matter, we will not comment here on the long and noticeable absence of philosophy from the history of human thought from post-Constantine antiquity till the enlightenment, except to say that it was caused by Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church who discovered the logically simplest solution with habitual infallibility:

“Mulier taceat in ecclesia.” (A woman’s place in church be silence)

St. Paul of Tarsus. 1 Cor. 14, 34. (5-67 C.E.).

The Holy Spirit – allegedly a pigeon and also a known ex vitro inseminator of sheltered modest virgins, second as such only to Zeus (consider, inter alia, the earliest known pre-Lohengrin swan whisperer, Leda) – must have relinquished this pearl of wisdom on his way out.

But once the megawatt bulb of the enlightenment came on, things positively changed – or did they?

“Woman: a human being that dresses, chatters and undresses.”

François Marie Arouet  a.k.a. Voltaire (1694-1778).

Leave it to a Frenchman to evaluate profound questions first and foremost for their fashion impact! It was an interesting commentary for a man professed disconsolate over the passing of Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet, arguably the most evolved mathematical mind in her day in France, who had introduced him to the sciences and, aside from being his lover, was his copyrighted partner in responding to the 1734 prize question of the Académie des Sciences about the ‘nature of fire.’ Rumor has it she wrote the whole thing and gave Voltaire some mercy credit.

Then came a man who originally planned to emigrate to Pennsylvania to form a commune and, with his classmate, married two sisters to that end. They neglected to poll their ladies intentions, which is unsurprising in light of his groundbreaking tenet:

"The man’s desire is for the woman; but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man. "

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Table Talk. July 23, 1827. (1772-1834).

Colderidge’s theory explicitly permits exceptions. His manifestation of Murphy’s Law was that he happened to marry one without having done his homework. Yes, caveat emptor.

Kant (1724-1804), for one, basically thought that every single thing imaginable was immoral, including women. He was right. Yet, regardless, and supported by anecdotal evidence of continued population growth, the quest continues for a reason why anyone would seem to care.

Schopenhauer is too often viewed as little more than a commentator on Kant. In fact, he is a pessimistic thinker in his own right (“suffering is the substance of all life”), though he is generally more articulate than the sage of Königsberg:

“Thus nature has equipped women, as it has all its creatures, with the tools and weapons she needs for securing her existence, and at just the time she needs them; in doing which nature has acted with its usual economy. For just as the female ant loses its wings after mating, since they are then superfluous, indeed harmful to the business of raising the family, so the woman usually loses her beauty after one or two childbeds, and probably for the same reason.”

Arthur Schopenhauer. “On Women.” In: Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1970, 80-81.

“As a consequence of her weaker reasoning powers, woman has a smaller share of the advantages and disadvantages these bring with them. She is, rather, a mental myopic…”

Arthur Schopenhauer. “On Women.” In: Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1970, 82-83.

“It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual instinct that could give that stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race the name of the fair sex; for the entire beauty of the sex is based on this instinct. One would be more justified in calling them the unaesthetic sex than the beautiful. “

Arthur Schopenhauer.

“Woman is an animal with long hair and short-sighted.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860).

Another analyst like Menander, then, with a pronounced faible for zoological paradigmata. That is what happens if you do not find time to take your children to the zoo yourself. If you let father do it, count on him to draw unflattering analogies – significantly, before reaching the ape house.

“The relationship between man and woman is nothing other than that of subject and object. Man is Something, woman is Nothing.”

Otto Weininger, Schopenhauer’s acolyte (1880-1903).

No wonder that man killed himself in the room where Beethoven had died. Ta-ta-ta-tamm! Now, here’s proof that no such thing as bad publicity exists for untenured philosophers.

For all you trivia lovers, there actually is some Nietzsche beyond the whip. He comes in plenty shades of gray:

“Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).

“Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.”

Friedrich Nietzsche.

“Woman was God’s second mistake.”

Friedrich Nietzsche. The Antichrist.

“Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has a single solution: that is, pregnancy.”

Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Still, the Great Whippersnapper may have stumbled onto something late in life:

“Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.”

Friedrich Nietzsche.

We can now safely depart from the assorted witticisms of philosophy’s lengthy Blue Period and turn to the likely most truthful scholarly confession made by man to date:

"The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'"

Sigmund Freud in conversation with Marie Bonaparte in 1925, quoted by Jones, Ernest. Sigmund Freud: Life and Work. Hogarth Press, London, 1955, Vol. 2, 468.

For a mixed bag of reasons (and advisors), some of the most enlightened summaries today are given by thinkers who recognize that their office rests on a slim and thinking majority of female voters:

“The best judge of whether or not a country is going to develop is how it treats its women. If it’s educating its girls, if women have equal rights, that country is going to move forward. But if women are oppressed and abused and illiterate, then they are going to fall behind.”

Barack Hussein Obama, Ladies’ Home Journal, September 2008.

“This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths. Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women’s equal rights across the world for centuries. At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities….. The truth is that male religious leaders have had – and still have – an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.”

James Earl Carter. Losing My Religion for Equality. July 2009.

Perplexing that one can still find voices who would argue with that circa 2012. C.E.

Sapere aude. A neo-Kantian translation of that might be “go figure”…