Episode #065 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

So, it seems clear that in the year 1759 there were two guys—one named William Hawes, one named Thomas Cogan—and they started a charity together. Now, if you were trying to Google this charity in today’s world, it would be known as the Royal Humane Society. But at the time these guys started it, it was, well, a highly controversial thing. The reason why is because, well, William Hawes and Thomas Cogan were doctors. They cared about people. And they were starting this charity as two staunch advocates of a very controversial medical practice in the year 1759, one that was very new at the time and largely denounced by the general public and medical community. You, the modern listener, might know it better as resuscitation—which, by the way, is a very difficult word to say and not sound weird. Resuscitation. Resuscitation. You know it as resuscitation—you know, the thing where people stop breathing and you bring them back to life, right?

Point is, what is now known as the Royal Humane Society at its inception was known as the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned. A little less catchy, I think. By the way, real quick, what a great example of the fact that one age’s controversial medical practice can be another age’s medical norm. But anyway, when these guys are sitting around having their charity kick-off meeting—they’re brainstorming all the ways they can resuscitate more people. Like, “How do we resuscitate the most amount of people today?”—one of the big ideas that they had was that they were going to have a sort of cash bounty for people that had recently drowned. Seriously, their idea was that they’d pay fishermen and boaters and people that were out by the water anyway. And if they came across a body floating in the river, they flipped it over, and they saw even a smidgen of life coursing through it, they would pay this seafaring gentleman or lady a monetary reward, a bounty, to pull these people up onto their boat or onto the shore and try to save their life. They’d even pay you just to bring these half-lifeless bodies to these disparate safehouses along the river that they had set up. It was the start of something great.

Now, one of these bodies that was pulled out of the River Thames near London, England and was successfully resuscitated back to life was a woman that had tried to commit suicide by throwing herself into the river just a few hours before. This woman found herself at a terrible crossroads in her life—subjugated, misunderstood, castigated by society around her, largely ignored by her contemporaries as an intellectual. But despite all this, she may have been my favorite philosopher in the history of the world. This woman that at one point in her life was brought back to life after a failed suicide attempt would eventually become a crucially important thinker in the Enlightenment, essentially single-handedly laying the groundwork for anything that we call proper feminism in today’s world. Her name was Mary Wollstonecraft.

But I can’t just gloss over that kind of anecdote, can I? I mean, what brings someone to feel like they’re so trapped, that their situation is so hopeless that while using every ounce of intellect that they have, the only possible way that their brains can come up with is to end it all? This becomes even more fascinating when you consider just how brilliant and passionate of a woman she was. But the question remains: what kind of life, what situation brought her to this place where she’s being pulled out of a river by a fisherman and being brought back to life?

Not many philosophers face the kind of adversity that Mary Wollstonecraft went through. Not many philosophers have a life story where you look back at it and you go, “Oh, yeah, given Plato’s life, it’s no wonder he wrote the stuff he did.” No, there’s all kinds of different cocktails of experiences that produce great thinkers. Many philosophers didn’t have interesting lives. They were just people born into a financially or socially privileged living situation, and they just kind of locked themselves in a pantry and wrote everything in solitude. But not all of them were like this. Epictetus comes to mind. He was a slave. Descartes famously—horribly sick most of his life. Mary Wollstonecraft is another. Her life vividly shows just what kind of woman and thinker she was from even the earliest years in her life. Her life in many ways was her work. And taking a closer look at it, I think it can help us understand why she thought the way she did and why she got such a bad rap from the people writing about her after she died.

So, let’s start at the beginning, alright? She was born on April 27th, 1759, which positions her perfectly as a thinker during the same time that many of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment that we’ve already talked about were doing their best work: Rousseau, Voltaire, Burke, Paine, etc. Now, more important than the particular date she was born on is the particular living situation she was born into. Every report pretty conclusively agrees that she was born into a very conservative household where her parents had far from a perfect relationship. And when I say far from a perfect relationship, I mean that her dad would get drunk and beat her mother senseless on the regular. She recounts lying on the floor outside of her mom’s room in an attempt to try to protect her from him. That’s the kind of childhood this girl’s coming from.

So, even from very early on, we can see this desire to protect the women around her, deliver them from injustice. By the way, this is not the only example we have of this tendency of hers early in life. Famously, in the year 1784, she had a sister named Eliza who was in this abusive, terrible marriage. And Mary Wollstonecraft in the very early years of her life herself with so much to lose, by the way—so much bad could have come from this—she pulled strings and facilitated her sister’s escape from this abusive marriage. Here again, yet another example early on in Mary Wollstonecraft’s life that demonstrates the courage to challenge the conventions of society in the favor of equality even if it meant potentially horrible things happening to her.

Now, not long after helping her sister Eliza she lands a job as the governess—the sort of personal tutor—for a prominent family with four young daughters. Now, she writes about how when she met these four young girls for the first time, they were just like most other women back then: conditioned by society and the people around them to be this unqualified thing that’s just designed to get married someday. Mary Wollstonecraft noticed that from the very moment these four girls were born—and most all women back then, for that matter, by the way—they were fed cues by everyone around them that a successful life for a woman is a life where your needs are tended to. So, how do you do that as a woman? Well, you get married. And the way you get married is you have to be a good wife. What is a good wife? One where you stay quiet and you look really good in a corset.

So, if you’re a young woman coming of age in this society and you want to have a “successful” life in the eyes of the people around you, you aren’t dreaming of owning your own mining operation one day. You’re not dreaming of working your way up to the professorship in a major university. No, the people around you constantly tell you, statistically speaking, that your job, if you want your needs met, is to look pretty and be submissive, be the sexual playthings of men. And if you follow up your end of the arrangement, well, maybe some guy, some nice guy someday will be generous enough to bestow upon you everything that you need for a couple three decades. And then at that point, you can cross your fingers that he won’t kick you to the curb when you’re not the belle of the ball anymore. But his reason for doing that won’t be for you; it’ll be out of the fear that society will judge him and ruin his reputation.

Anyway, point is, when you’re a young woman living in this world, the behavior set that yields you a successful life is one of submission. It’s one of aesthetics. It’s not one of education or critical thinking or independence even if these things were possible for a woman back then. No, Mary Wollstonecraft says that the plight of the average woman living during her time is to be forced into the role of a sexual slave. Oh, and by the way, she points out, how ironic is that given the time period that she’s living in. Considering the fact we’re having all these conversations about things like unalienable rights and slavery, considering this discussion we’re having about the ethical implications of enslaving indigenous people on the grounds of race alone, why is there a double standard here? She asked. She said that women in this regard are nothing more than convenient slaves and that “slavery even in this case will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent.”

Now, let’s slow down for a second. I feel like I went 0 to 60 too quick in this episode. Let’s slow down. If you think that she’s wrong, if you think that maybe Mary Wollstonecraft’s just being a little melodramatic right now—like, “Oh, come on. Alright, yes, you got it bad, Mary. But you’re no one’s sexual slave. Come on.”—if that’s what you think, just listen to the narrative she’s responding to. John Locke, he comes out with his famous tabula rasa, blank slate. We’ve learned about it. And as you know by now, it’s a really controversial work at the time that it’s released. Thinkers are finally starting to really consider the fact that maybe the content of someone’s character might really just be contingent on the collection of experiences they’ve had thus far in their life. And if that’s true, well, what are the moral implications of that, and how can we use that fact to our advantage as we explore this daunting task of nation building?

So, because these thinkers are seriously considering this concept for the first time, you can imagine that a topic that almost every great thinker during the Enlightenment is going to have thoughts on was education. One of the most grand and commented-on of any of the works of education during this time was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. Now, Emile is unique in a certain regard because Rousseau explicitly talks not only about the education of men, but he makes a clear distinction between how men should be educated and how women should be educated, acknowledging in that way that there are obvious, huge differences between men and women. So their education should be catered specifically to those differences.

Here’s what Rousseau says about how women should be educated specifically: “The whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, and to make life agreeable and sweet to them—these are the duties of women at all times, and what should be taught to them from their infancy.” Now, I don’t know. Who would have thought that the education of women involved so many domestic chores being done? I don’t know, I guess they really like doing that kind of stuff.

Anyway, this is what Wollstonecraft is reading and trying to respond to. And you can see how it starts to sound vaguely familiar to slavery, right? What, your duty is to be useful to me: to counsel me, to console me, to make life agreeable and sweet to me? No, wait, so, let me get this straight. Basically, your entire existence, everything that you do, is in relation to something in my existence, right? I don’t know, it sounds a little slavey to me. But what Mary Wollstonecraft is saying here is that this is the sort of thinking that’s propagating the problem in the first place. I mean, after all, if what John Locke says is true, that almost everything comes from the education and experiences that you’ve had so far, why would women be excluded from that? And how convenient, she says, that women who do have access to the educational opportunities that men do end up doing just as good as men do.

She says, “Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavor to keep women in the dark, because the former only wants slaves and the latter a plaything.” What she’s saying in a beautiful way—I love her writing more than most philosophers—is that this system that keeps women these sexual and domestic slaves, the nature of the institution of marriage during her time period, it’s like a tyrant. Tyrants want playthings and slaves, right? She’s saying, it benefits the tyrant to keep women in the dark. If they gave them the educational opportunities that men had, well, they wouldn’t have the constant, replenishing stock of slaves to pull from. It would be an end to blind obedience.

Keep in mind, this may not be revolutionary to most people listening to this, but I just want to make sure it’s said. By this point in time there is a long history of society perceiving women to be mentally and physically inferior to men. But the great question that Mary Wollstonecraft’s raising here is, isn’t this sort of like a chicken or the egg thing? Is it that women are inferior to men, or is it that us underserving and subjugating women in response to that long tradition of perceived inferiority, does that create an illusion that they are weaker than men? And she raises this question, and she does all of this using the very same tools that all the other great Enlightenment thinkers were using at the time.

What Mary Wollstonecraft is doing is pointing out in a brilliant way that all of this discourse that’s going on in the name of equality and rights is not something just reserved for men, that true equality would be for men and women, not equality for men and then women can be this subspecies of slaves for the more equal. I mean, it’s funny. We often look back on these Enlightenment thinkers: we think of them as our forefathers, these great liberty-loving dudes that ushered in a new age of equality. But here’s Mary Wollstonecraft living in the thick of it, showing how even they, even our forefathers, weren’t taking equality seriously enough. She’s critiquing those guys.

This pursuit of true equality is something that underlies almost all of her work. Although she’s most known for her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which we’ve touched on, years before in 1790 she read Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” which as you know is a very conservative fanfare denouncing the way that the French Revolution was handled. And it exalted tradition as our ultimate guide. Well, you can just see how Mary Wollstonecraft might disagree with that. I mean, tradition, if you’re Mary Wollstonecraft, that’s what got women like her and her mother and her sister—that’s what got them in the situations they found themselves in in the first place, this appeal to tradition. In her eyes, tradition needs to be constantly questioned.

Point is, when Mary Wollstonecraft got the job as the governess of the four young girls, when she first met them, they were ordinary women of their age: submissive, quiet, just sexual slaves waiting to be loaded up onto a boat and carried off to some distant shore. But the four of them would end up being a profound case study that is emblematic of her entire body of work. I mean, all four of them reportedly after being taught Mary were highly intelligent, clever, passionate, independent; they all went on to do incredible things with their lives. And there’s no doubt it was the education that made the difference.

After Mary Wollstonecraft died, she was castigated by people for being a vixen, a whore basically. They looked at her life. They saw that she had kids with multiple different guys outside of the sacred bonds of marriage. “How dare she? She is not a proper lady! What woman would ever allow herself to stoop so low?” What many of these people didn’t understand is that, yeah, Mary Wollstonecraft didn’t marry these guys, and that was because she protested the institution of marriage as a whole. It was legalized slavery for women back then. You should read the marriage laws back then. The amount of control that women had over their life once they got married was just atrocious. It was signing over your life. It’s this misunderstanding, the constant heckling of the society around her, the troubled past—these are the sorts of things that would contribute to her being the type of person that was pulled out of a river and brought back against her will after a suicide attempt.

See, Mary Wollstonecraft dared to question the social conventions around her. In a world filled with extraordinary thinkers questioning the status quo, she went further than they did arguably. And she did it in a world that treated her horribly and one where that dissent could have very easily led to her death. Now, I get that’s true of many of the revolutionaries from this time, but just imagine, imagine trying to garner respect being a woman as well—all the other adversity plus being a woman. Just imagine trying to get your ideas out there. It’s something to behold, really. She dared to question this conditioning, this conditioning that’s spoon-fed into us since birth that tells us what a “successful life” is. Maybe it isn’t just to look beautiful and speak when spoken to.

You know, there’s an even more interesting point that I get when I read Mary Wollstonecraft, and it comes down to analyzing the term “successful life.” What is a successful life? Maybe that’s misleading. Here’s what I mean by that. Back then, women were being conditioned to believe that a successful life is one where you are submissive to your husband who buys you everything. That was wrong. We’d like to think that we’re no longer giving women that message. Okay, so, what’s the message we’re giving them now? In other words, what are we conditioning women to become now? Now, the bigger point is that men were being conditioned to be something back then too, weren’t they? There was some ideal of a successful life that society and culture was imbuing into them from the moment they were born. And there still is. In fact, every single one of us from the very moment we’re born has been conditioned by our parents and our teachers and the media, our friends, you name it. We have been conditioned to believe that a certain behavior set is admirable. We respect people that embody this behavior set. Sometimes we maybe look down on people that don’t embody our particular one.

But isn’t this just another, albeit more modern, version of the “successful life.” Isn’t it entirely arbitrary? Isn’t it just as legitimate as the one from Wollstonecraft’s time where women are conditioned to be slaves? On that same note, isn’t our definition of what that admirable behavior set is—isn’t that constantly changing as well? How useful of a skill was typing quickly 50 years ago? It was just a random skill. Nobody knew how to type. Now, fast-forward to today’s world: it may be one of the most useful skills you could possibly have. Now people are learning to type on touch screens. I have a prediction, people. The behavior and skill set that’s admirable to somebody is going to constantly change as the culture and world changes around them.

Now, here’s the thing. Your conception of what proper etiquette is, of how to treat your spouse in a relationship, of what sorts of things are worth thinking about, everything, everything is equally as subject to change as that skill of typing quickly. We know this. We look back at the people of Mary Wollstonecraft’s time, and we see a stark difference between what an admirable set of behaviors is. So, the important question to ask I think is, what makes it change? If we truly think that the way we condition women now is better than the way we conditioned them back then, what is responsible for that change?

Well, I don’t know, but I have a guess. I think I may talk about it for a living. It’s weird. See, this progress doesn’t just sort of slowly fade into existence, right? It happens in bursts. There are revolutions. These cultural paradigm shifts occur when someone opens their eyes, they see the way we’re conditioning people to behave, they point out some sort of glaring injustice or inconsistency, and then the rest of society realizes that they’re right. And change occurs. The people make an adjustment to what we condition people to become or what they see a “successful life” as. I think philosophy and religion are largely responsible for these cultural paradigm shifts. Mary Wollstonecraft in her niche was responsible for one of these cultural paradigm shifts. And it raises a really good question, I think. What are you being conditioned to believe? What have you been conditioned to believe since birth? Who is the tyrant giving you this conditioning? What is the tyrant? What do they want you to become? What are you being conditioned into in today’s world?

Because one thing’s for certain, right? The way that you look at the world and what acceptable behavior is is no doubt going to be looked back on by people in the future and ridiculed. In the same way we’re ridiculing Rousseau for believing that women are inferior to men, they’re going to ridicule you. I’m sorry. You and I both, my friend, we are going to be lambasted by future generations. And it’s so easy to grow complacent. “Oh, okay, well, I realize that’s the case. I realize I may be patronizing causes that future generations are going to think were barbaric. But that’s the thing. I don’t know what the next thing will be. I live in this generation. I’ll just defend the best behavior set I can that the tyrant gives me during my lifetime, and I’ll call it good.”

But what if Mary Wollstonecraft had that attitude? What if Voltaire had that attitude? Maybe you won’t know what the next thing is, but simply acknowledging how fleeting and arbitrary this value set that you’ve arrived at truly is is actually very freeing. Just imagine, just imagine a crazy world where people looked at other people that didn’t do things the exact way they do or believe in the same things they do, and they didn’t meet them with hostility. Or they didn’t go on a witch hunt. They didn’t try to publicly flog them on the news. But instead they asked the question, what conditioning might have led to this behavior? Because once you ask that, you can ask, is it possible that with just a few conversations of conditioning that their minds might be changed? I inflate like a balloon when I think about the fact that Mary Wollstonecraft realized this.

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.