Women have an essential role to play in dissident movements
On warm hearths, quiet alliances, and the covenant of security
Give the gift of Becoming Noble to a friend this Christmas!
‘Tis the season for cozy-posting, and here is my offering to you.
This is an entreatment to break bread together, to build the fires and deep bonds that will be necessary to survive our civilizational winter.
A great source of strength for the American founders was the extent to which they dined together. The age of the secret dinner party is coming again.
George Washington’s diary reveals that in 1774 - on the eve of war - he and his wife Martha entertained guests on more than half the nights that he was home (136 of 207 evenings).
His guests varied, and were not merely calculated political engagements:
…the individuals who had dinner were neighbors, friends, fox-hunting companions, relatives, and business associates of George Washington. The majority were Virginians, either by birth or by choice. Other visitors were from the nearby colony of Maryland, while some were foreigners in America temporarily for business or a military assignment.
Entertaining in this fashion was common to many of the powerful families of early America. The dynamics of this source of strength were particularly evident in the Madison administration.
James Madison’s wife Dolley was expert at complementing her husband’s official activities with her own unofficial ones, including her famous ‘Wednesday night drawing rooms’.
Dolley recognised a unique challenge for the young republic. America was an experiment in democracy, and increasingly the newly elected officials coming to Washington were not exclusively the scions of well established families.
The new generation came from around the nation and from every background, and often had radically opposed political instincts. To form a functioning administration, they would have to be welded together into a new and coherent ruling class.
The creation of unofficial spaces characterised by drinking and dining proved essential to this endeavor. A warm, shared sphere of a leisure was necessary for the creation of society.
Today the term society can convey anything from a vague notion of "high society" to a synonym for culture. In the eighteenth century, in contrast, society had a very specific meaning, as a realm separate from the political sphere but, though private in some ways, distinct from the intimate family. Theoretically, within this sphere people met on terms of social equality, in an environment in which the arts, elevated conversation, and highly structured interpersonal behavior could soften and civilize them.
— Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics
Interactions in these unofficial spaces did not have to follow the same rules as formal negotiations. This loosening of limitations was valuable at a time in which the new hierarchies were not yet clear, in which the political etiquette of the new system had not been entirely defined, and in which the rules of engagement were not yet firmly established. This allowed risks to be taken even against a backdrop of considerable uncertainty and discomfort.
The unofficial space, outside the legitimate public forum, allows more room to maneuver than official space. Its inherent liminality permits the flexibility necessary… male politicians used the atmosphere of sociability to propose, to probe, to negotiate, and to compromise. Food, drink, music, conversation in a dramatic setting enabled the release necessary to risk. In a crowded room one may propose matters that would seem too chancy if made in an office. The myriad distractions of the event could be used by both parties to deflect or withdraw if the situation warranted it.
The revolutionary period was a time with many parallels to our own. A coming together of peoples was necessary, and with it the formation of a new deep and shared identity. New national values had to be established and accepted.
Naturally, much of this had to be negotiated in the formal political spheres of men, with their direct arguments, open competition, explicit hierarchies, and the implicit threat of violence. But alternative, female-curated environments and processes served an invaluable assistive function in generating goodwill and brotherhood, moderating the excesses of the masculine form of action, allowing for necessary ceasefires and the traversing of divides without the loss of face.
The particular feminine virtues of empathy, warmth, gentleness and kindness were essential.
Dolley recognized the function of kinship and the power to create kin from tenuous ties. Almost anyone could be claimed as kin, so deeply and closely woven were the marriage and blood links among the southern gentry families. When she could not find a link, she invented one.
The dinner party and the shared social event were the perfect foundation in which to establish and nurture these ties.
Across the Atlantic, Immanuel Kant was also writing on the moral value of the dinner party. He believed that through the intentional adoption of social graces that society events demanded, participants could not help but internalize these values.
Affability, sociability, courtesy, hospitality, and gentleness (in disagreeing without quarreling) are, indeed, only tokens; yet they promote the feeling for virtue itself by a striving to bring this illusion as near as possible to the truth.
— Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals
Coming together in these events will be a necessary test for us - for the men and women of our sphere, in our time. Will the values that we advocate for be practicable in communion? Will the people that we advocate for actually feel like our brothers, our people?
For a movement that has long existed in disembodied form, it will be a healthy catalyst to force us to present our best selves, our selves at our most beautiful and charitable, to test our own self images against how others perceive us. We will validate that we have the capacity to be mutually social and thus able to build the society that we imagine.
Dinner parties are, for Kant, part of the “highest ethico-physical good,” the ultimate resolution of the conflict between our physical body and our moral powers, which consists in finding the right proportions for the “mixture” between our partly “sensuous” and partly “ethico-intellectual” nature.
According to Kant, dinner parties generate the enjoyment of “moral culture within society”.
— Alix Cohen, The Ulimate Kantian Experience: Kant on Dinner Parties
Dinners are warm and wholesome and real. They also represent a microcosm of political organisation, in which alliances and relationships can be developed, and the summoning and refinement of aesthetics, traditions, and manners can be practiced.
Spaces and material culture play other important roles as well, serving as concrete symbols of comfort, security, and stability. Impressions of legitimacy and tradition become especially valuable on a frontier, where the overwhelming wildness of the physical landscape dominates.
— Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics
But there is a difference between us and the founders. They dined at a period of civilizational spring, when their country and their people were ready to burst forth into world history. We dine in winter, when the nature and purpose of our events will be different.
I am very much reminded of a talk given by
a couple of years back, on the allegory of the fox in the snow. Dave tells of a time that he was struck by an encounter with a fox during the deep winter.I couldn't imagine really living in this hostile environment for very long, even in a survivalist capacity, and this fox was literally just hopping up and down in the snow, sticking out like a snow storm sore thumb, red.
You could see it from a mile away, and it was eating thistles, these hard thistles, and it was dragging them away to its den. It wasn't hibernating - it was surviving.
It was surviving because its parameters for life had changed significantly. In the summer it was a free animal that could go wherever it wanted; and now its life had been contracted to going from the den to where it could get food and then straight back again.
Dave calls for his audience to find their wintertime mode of life, in which the safety and stability of the wider world cannot be assumed. Conditions have become more harsh, and we cannot blindly trust our environment to sustain us. Our parameters for life have changed.
But a good life, a rich life, a virtuous life, is still very much possible. We can still be strong and healthy and vital: but we must adapt. We must carve out our spaces of warmth and of life.
The people who are here now are the friends of winter, because they're under no illusion that that we're going to be living together in some renewed summer… a temporary storm that will be over.
They know that we're going to be in this state now and in perpetuity. That we are waiting for a spring that is a far way off indeed, and we may not be able to see it.
But we're going to build our lives in a way where we can live and thrive in winter. We're going to try to be the friends of winter. We're going to live in the location of winter. We're going to discover the saints of winter, the divinity of winter, God's own true nature in winter.
This is going to be a time of small places, of deep relationships, of cozy settings, and of storms that rage on in the background. And sometimes storms that we're caught in, and that we have to move quickly to get out of.
It's going to be a time of building, but building deeply. It's going to be a time of spirituality, but a spirituality that's hidden.
In this time, to test our strength, to test our humanity, we must challenge ourselves to actually provide a nourishing existence for others. We must provide our families and our people with safety and joy amidst the storm.
Kant described the greatest dinner parties as covenants of security and secrecy. This must be our standard.
There is something analogous to the confidence between men, who eat together at the same table, and their familiarity with ancient customs like those of the Arab, with whom a stranger may feel safe as soon as he has been able to obtain a refreshment (a drink of water) in the Arab’s tent; or by accepting salt and bread offered by deputies coming to her from Moscow, the Russian Czarina could regard herself as secure from all snares by the bond of hospitality. Eating together at the same table is regarded as formal evidence of such a covenant of security.
— Immanuel Kant, Anthropology
Through the creation of such a space of warmth and closeness, we will summon the security necessary for our friends to finally express their long repressed doubts about the insanity of the modern world.
Through these human bonds, this shared bread, we will be ensuring that those around us, if questioned “who are your people?”, will immediately think of us.
Together we will survive the storm.
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
The practice of hospitality is not just sharing a meal. It is opening oneself to others, it is vulnerability and a willingness to be injured in the quest for the community you are endorsing. We too often over complicate the process and miss the blessing.
The mistake many seem to make today is that winter has just begun, but brother it’s been this way throughout all the 20th century. Winter is passing, but it will pass as we come together, break bread, and build our communities in that cold winter darkness that our Lord was born in.
We will see the spring, but we can, if we’d like, already see it in the eyes of our brothers and sisters who share our fire on these long nights.