Aster,

Charles’ references to the social situation of women in the Medieval and early modern period are very revelant but I believe he crucially misreads how the essential philosophical issues apply.

Maybe, but I’m not yet sure we agree what my reading is of the essential philosophical issues or of their application.

I have work and don’t have time to go into the details, so I’ll just say that I consider this book [Leonard Shalin's The Alphabet Versus the Goddess] profoundly wrong, pseudo-feminist, are far more likely to re-enslave women than aid the feminist project.

I agree with you about that, but I don’t know why you brought it up. I’m not advocating a primitive matriarchy theory (or a medieval matriarchy theory, which I suppose is even less plausible) when I say that the mass torture and murder of women in the Renaissance and early modernity did have something importantly to do with the process of modernization. Or that this ought to complicate the attitude that we take towards modernity and the social process of modernization. And I really don’t know what I said that would give you the idea that I would believe in such theories.

That women were generally better off in, say, the 12th century than they were in the 16th or 17th seems to me to be a matter of empirical fact, and so does the fact that mainstream treatments of women’s history often get this wrong — indeed often say things that are the exact opposite of the truth, and blame the Middle Ages for things that never happened until the height of the Renaissance or later — typically because they tend to presume that modernization is the same thing as intellectual and moral progress. That that progress-narrative happens to be wrong is, I think, a datum that any adequate theory needs to explain. But recognizing this basic fact is one thing; deciding what to do with it, having recognized it, is another.

Certainly, seeing a problem with the common progress-narrative is not the same thing as rejecting the notion that there can be moral or intellectual progress. Or believing that the only way to achieve such “progress” is by recovering some mythic past. Believing that there was something deeply wrong with the process of modernization is not the same thing as believing that everything was wrong about everything that happened in the course of modernization. I don’t believe any of those things.

What I believe is that there were and are alternatives to the master’s modernization. Alternatives which would represent genuine and unalloyed progress, rather than the massacres and mass enslavement that we actually got. When I criticize the latter, and point out that there were very important respects in which it made some things very much worse than they had been, that doesn’t mean that what I’m calling for is a recovery of the premodern status quo ante, in any sense. I’m calling for the achievement of something else entirely, which is neither forwards, nor backwards, but rather simply beyond (and therefore off the tracks).