Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Hierarchie vs. Egalitarismus; Feminismus, Ideologie (Definition); Hierarchie (männliche) als Wurzel allen Übels; Rechtfertigung des Es. durch Psychologen, Theologen usw.

Kurzinhalt: Since all differentiations ... are nothing more than the arbitrary creations of powerful, heterosexual, white males to maintain their own positions of power, these differentiations are at worst evil and at best insignificant and must therefore be ...

Textausschnitt: HIERARCHY VERSUS EGALITARIANISM

92a Our situation would be bad enough if the only thing we had to contend with today were a lot of imperial American selves willy-nilly creating themselves and their values and hanging loose from the larger society as a result. But our situation is much worse than that. For what we also confront is a host of psychologists, ethicists, theologians and New Agers who exalt this way of life as psychologically healthy, morally sound, theologically progressive and spiritually fulfilling. As the Pope observes, "Today's widespread tendencies towards subjectivism, utilitarianism and relativism appear not merely as pragmatic attitudes or patterns of behavior, but rather as approaches having a basis in theory and claiming full cultural and social legitimacy" (VS 106). At the forefront of those who seek to legitimate the egalitarianism of the imperial self are the feminists, who today frankly admit that feminism is an ideology. An ideology is an interpretation of the whole of reality on the basis of one idea or insight into reality which is thought to explain the whole of it. Ideologies are, by definition, easy to understand, because all one really has to understand is the defining idea about which the rest of the ideology revolves. The defining idea of radical feminism is that all evils in the world are rooted in patriarchy and hierarchy and that all evils can therefore be eradicated by destroying patriarchy and hierarchy and replacing them with an egalitarian reordering of the whole of reality. As Sr. Sandra Schneiders puts it,

Because radical feminism identifies patriarchy, especially in its sacralized form of hierarchy, as the root of all forms of oppression, the root of its alternative vision is its resolute anti-hierarchicalism, or, to phrase it positively, its fundamental egalitarianism. This egalitarianism is much more comprehensive than equal individual rights, although equal rights are certainly part of the radical feminist agenda. It has to do with the equality of persons as human beings and even a kind of equality among all the orders of being within creation.1 (Fs)

93a The source of this ideology is a simple observation made by the feminists. All of the injustices in modern history have resulted from one group of human beings who think themselves superior trying to oppress those they believe inferior. And in every instance, those who think themselves superior have been primarily heterosexual males with white skin and political power. Hence, recent American history can be defined as the struggle by blacks, women and homosexuals to free themselves from the oppression of white heterosexual males. Is this not, after all and in the final analysis, what Marxism itself was all about, the attempts of workers to free themselves from the oppression of powerful, heterosexual, white, male capitalists? Indeed, once one's consciousness has been raised to recognize this pattern of superior versus inferior translated everywhere into powerful, heterosexual, white males versus everyone else, even the ecology movement can be viewed as a part of the struggle to eradicate that patriarchal hierarchy by which heterosexual, white, male capitalists see themselves as superior to nature and seek to exploit it as they have exploited everyone else. As Rosemary Radford Ruether puts it, "We cannot criticize the hierarchy of male over female without ultimately criticizing and overcoming the hierarchy of humans over nature."2

93b White over black, male over female, heterosexual over homosexual, capitalist over worker, man over nature—all are variations of a single, evil theme. Everywhere western man (read: male) has dichotomized his world in order to assert the superiority of himself at the expense of others. Everywhere he has created hierarchies of inequality in order to install himself on the top rung. (Fs)

93c Herein lies the theoretical justification for the trivializing of all differentiations. Since all differentiations, by the reckoning of feminist ideology, are nothing more than the arbitrary creations of powerful, heterosexual, white males to maintain their own positions of power, these differentiations are at worst evil and at best insignificant and must therefore be either eradicated or trivialized. Thus feminist theologians confront the Catholic Church today with the "non-negotiable" conviction, as Schneiders puts it, that "hierarchy is the root of sinful structures and ... it must be eradicated and replaced with an egalitarian vision and praxis if the human family and the earth are to survive and flourish."3 Here we have that situation in which the immovable object is confronted by the irresistible force. For the Church's conviction is equally clear and non-negotiable. The Trinity is a patriarchal hierarchy, and it is in the image of that patriarchal hierarchy that man, male and female, is created and from which he must seek his identity. (Fs) (notabene)