Contrarian Brendan O'Neill takes aim at the "new feminism" which characterises the Enlightenment as "the folly of male ideas":
The new feminism is strikingly concerned with exposing what it — and the political and cultural elites more broadly — views as the folly of ‘male ideas’ and the limits to Enlightened thinking. This is spelled out explicitly by Jacqueline Rose, author of Women in Dark Times. ‘Feminism’, she says, ‘should alert us to the world’s unreason’. For too long, says Rose, we have believed that ‘the so-called reason or enlightenment of our modern world’ can deliver progress and liberate humanity. It’s a story of ‘light triumphing over darkness’, she says, and it’s outdated. What we need now is a political outlook which ‘confront
dark with dark’.
Rose says the great thing about the new feminism is that it can intervene in that ‘murky, not easily graspable place somewhere between [biology and culture]. A place of unreason… that runs through the world.’ Rose captures the alarmingly interventionist urge of the new feminism, which wants to rearrange, not simply law and politics, but also ‘biology and culture’, our very minds and daily interactions. More importantly, she reveals the new feminism’s desire to expose the shortcomings of Enlightenment and show us the ‘world of unreason’, where ‘we all reside’.
This view of feminism not merely as the securer of equality for women but as exposer of the dangers of the industrialised, Enlightened worldview has been a theme for some years. The Stalinist feminist Beatrix Campbell takes aim at ‘modernity’s Faustian recklessness’, at ‘the sexism — and destructiveness — of modernity’.
She presents growth and progress as male values, which feminism has risen once again to question. ‘Macho, manic productionism relies on force’, she says. ‘It valorises conquest of nature and other humans.’ Feminism, by contrast, is concerned with creating a society that can ‘breathe, give birth, grow and rest, clean up’ — because that’s what women do, right? Have babies and clean up?
‘Male’ modernity wants to produce and grow and control nature, whereas ‘female’ thinking wants to force humanity, in Rose’s words, to ‘recognise the failure [of humankind’s] stiff-backed control, its ruthless belief in its own mastery, its doomed attempt to bring the uncertainty of the world to heel’.
This is fundamentally what the new feminism represents. It is the outward expression of the post-Enlightened West’s own, inner disdain for the idea of humankind’s mastery, the idea of our being reasoned, able to deploy our rational thinking in the name of taming the planet and expanding human wealth and comfort.
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/feminism-and-the-turn-against-enlightenment/17057#.VXoTPvmqqko