The civilizing influence

"Must women 'civilize' men?" Joan Walsh asks in her column today in Salon.com. After all, it is the position of many conservative thinkers (See Charles Murray) and politicians (See Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, et. al.) that this is the role of women in society. That it is the only role they should play in society. They must stay home, tend the fires, raise the kids, and be there whenever their husbands want them. This is the basis of all human civilization and when women seek to play any other role, that civilization begins to break down. In this worldview, all the problems of our society today can be traced back to women trying to break out of the mold that genetics put them into, and everything would be fine again if women would just shut up and fit themselves back into that mold.

And why should it be women's responsibility to provide that civilizing influence? Are men such wild and base creatures that they have no instinct for civilized behavior on their own? What an insulting idea.

The conservative model for family is set in stone. It consists of a man and a woman and children, with the man the head of the household and the provider and everyone else subservient to him. If you take away from the man that role of family ruler then you have taken away his whole reason for being and the thing which gives him the veneer of civilization, the thing that distinguishes him from beasts. Wives who enter the workforce are demeaning their husbands and usurping their role of provider. And in the philosophy of today's conservatives, women who seek to control their own bodies and the number of children which they have are interfering with the husband's responsibility and prerogative. Yes, some people who live here in the second decade of the 21st century do actually think like that. You can hear them on conservative talk-radio or, for that matter, on the Fox News Network any hour of the day.

My thought is - and I think Joan Walsh would agree with me - that the sexes civilize each other. We complete each other. We form a unit, two halves of a whole. We create a family together and that is the basis of our civilization. But civilization is not the sole responsibility of one sex or the other. It is in every way a joint undertaking. And it works best and is most successful when both parts of the unit are equally valued and respected and when each has the capacity to bring out the best that is in the other. We each rub off the rough edges on the other and that is the real civilizing influence.

George and Scrooge

Two iconic literary characters of this time of year are essentially mirror images of each other.

George Bailey is the ultimate self-sacrificing good citizen. His first sacrifice is to jump into the freezing water of a pond to rescue his little brother. It seems from that point on, the trajectory of his life is determined. Whenever he has to make a choice between his desires and what would be the greater good for his family or his community, he gives up his desires and his dreams of world travel to serve that family and community. When the crunch comes, he questions all the decisions he has ever made and thinks the world would have been better off if he had never been born. Through the intervention of his guardian angel, Clarence, he gets to see that alternative life - or un-life - and gets the ultimate Christmas gift of learning just what his life has meant to everyone around him. He has really had a pretty wonderful life, after all.

Scrooge, on the other hand, is the quintessential miser - miserly in his emotions, miserly in sharing his financial wealth with the world, miserly in taking even the smallest step to make the world a better, warmer place. He had a choice to make early on, also, between the woman who was then the love of his life and money which would become the love of his life. Of course, he chose money and all of the other choices of his life flowed from this beginning. Every act of his life revolved around the hunger to gain more and more money. His greatest joy in life was to squeeze a shilling until it screamed and to pay as little as possible for any of the services he received. He totally ignored all the want and suffering around him.

For Scrooge, one angel wasn't enough to redeem him. It took the shade of his old partner, Jacob Marley, plus three angels to show him the past, present, and future and convince him that he had taken a wrong turn all those years ago. In the end, he is convinced and spends the rest of his life trying to make up for all his wrongs. He becomes his community's George Bailey.

There are too many unredeemed Scrooges in our society today, but there are George Baileys, too; men and women who daily sacrifice their own wishes in order to take care of those around them. They are the bones that hold the body of civilization together.

What the world needs now is, yes, love, along with fewer misers - and more and stronger bones.