Robert Greer Cohn

    The death of Betty Friedan coincides with widespread concern about the viability of the modernist mindset (mainly Western) which she importantly helped to form, starting in 1963 (following Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex of 1949) with her assault on the traditional feminine role in the home and society at large.
    Many others joined in, often more recklessly, and she herself, somewhat alarmed, tempered her views in later years, but the main thrust of her (and her allies') effect is clear, and devastating.
    It can be summed up by La Fontaine's fable, "The Bear's Paving Stone" which shows a clumsily well-meaning creature crushing the face of his sleeping friend with a heavy stone directed at a pesky fly.
    The fly in society's face is the ancient spiritual subordination of women, since the early Hebrews and Greeks (as described by Robert Graves in The White Goddess) and
the concomitant usual relegation to domestic life.
    Sure, but the cure, as so often, has proved worse than the disease.
    Women may not be as bitter as her mother was about that restriction, and the (questionable) concern about overpopulation is reduced, but look at what we got:
    A drastically falling birth rate in Europe, undermining welfare for the elderly and necessitating massive migration of unassimilable and anti-Western Muslims, weakened families here and there, poorly raised and educated children, degraded national willingness to sacrifice or risk (life, goods) for family, community, country, tradtional Western (Judeo-Christian) values.
    Friedan, of course, had only a contributory role in this long-range decadence which threatens our survival against a fanatically motivated (Islamo-fascist) and demographically powerful enemy. The skewing of existence away from a healthy faith-reason balance beginning with pagan, polytheistic, Greco-Roman culture gained hugely in the reason-worshipping secularist Enlightenment—especially the French Revolution—and the totalitarian orders and neo-Marxist (or fascist, neo-classical) modernism generally.
    The anti-transcendent (morally and aesthetically) stunted and spiritually-blind and tone-deaf futuristic (non-Edenic) dynamically historicist, manipulative, self-centered, hedonistic, and gadget-loving mentality which got us into this fuss has no way of understanding its pathological roots.
    The "with-it" would surely laugh at any suggestion that Orthodox Judaism and Roman Catholicism (for all their crusty, dogmatic clutter) were and are right to worry about contraception, as well as, more evidently, abortion (and now, cloning).
    Conception, birth, devoted raising of children is the core of healthy and on-going earthly existence (authentic human creativity is close kin to this essentiality). The sickness and threatened death of the modernizing substitutes is obvious: obesity of all sorts and scatter-souled sterility.
    The southern hemisphere bids fair to do better. But what of us?