A World Built for Men

Men and women, living in the map

I’m hungry for learning / Won’t you answer me please? / Can a man and a woman / Live together in peace?

-Paul Simon, ‘Congratulations’

‘Harry, we have to love each other,’ she said. ‘We just have to love each other.’

-Raymond Carver, ‘How About This?’, from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

This week, I happened to listen to a recent lengthy BBC interview with Melinda French Gates,¹ in which she told us portentously that ‘the world was built for men’.

There is an awful lot one could say about the strange phenomenon of Melinda Gates, and how it is that such an unremarkable and, without wishing to be rude, bland person could have become so fabulously influential. But I found this comment particularly noteworthy as an example of what in a previous post I called ‘the conceptual conditions of ruin’, namely:

the reduction of the whole to the parts; the confusion of understanding with the representation of ‘already familiar abstractions or signs’; the application of the map or ‘crib’ rather than the comprehension of the reality.

What Gates meant with her comment seemed to be that men have created a working environment in which ‘systems’ have been ‘built’ which facilitate the career aspirations of young men as opposed to women. ‘Men,’ she tells us, ‘Have these built-in networking opportunities…the person who says “I’ll introduce you to that person who’ll introduce you to that person who will help fund your business”.’ Women, she goes on, do not have this ‘support’ and hence we are ‘sending them into a broken system.’

You hear this kind of message a lot in modern society. At the more thoughtful end of the spectrum, this is presented - as Gates herself presents it - as ‘inadvertent’. At the other end, it is theorised as a conspiracy. Either way, a picture emerges of men working hard to further each other’s careers, and keeping women locked out.

Let me make clear: I am not a men’s rights activist, and I do not have a particular axe to grind when it comes to any real or imagined ‘war between the sexes’. But I do think that it is important that we understood how foolish and misguided a picture of the relationship between men and women this kind of comment paints. This is not just because foolish and misguided ideas are worth refuting, or because they work to undermine healthy interactions between the two halves of humanity (though both of these things are true); it is also because the foolishness and misguidedness is an example of a broader trend which I, with no exaggeration, believe threatens the very foundations of a free society itself.

Let’s begin, then, with why the vision of the world of work which Gates sketches for us is so misleading. Leave to one side for a moment the fact that it is very old-fashioned and suggests that she hasn’t quite understood the way in which Western society has changed since she entered the world of work in the late 1980s. I have two young daughters and, let me tell you, the ‘support’ young girls nowadays get at school, in the media, and from society around them is unrelenting. (Indeed, if anything, I think it has gone beyond self-parody to the point at which it is now self-defeating.)

No. The real problem with Gates’ comments is that they present an account of the past which is utterly distorted by the concerns of our age - which, indeed, turns the past from a vast, integrated, irreducibly complex whole into a series of easily understandable, abstract symbols and signs; from, to go back to a familiar metaphor, the terrain itself, into a readily parsable map to use as a purported guide.

The truth about the past is that until very, very recently it would not have made much sense to the vast majority of men to describe what they did for a living as a ‘career’. What they did was work. They had jobs. And they didn’t really choose these jobs in any meaningful sense. While no doubt they were in many cases driven by ambition and professional pride and the desire also for material gain, they basically did what their fathers did, or became apprentices in local trades to which family members or neighbours introduced them. And then they did that until they were old. They would not have thought of their working lives as being ‘careers’ which they had to consciously mould, expand, or improve.

The idea, then, that men were all introducing each other to people who would ‘fund their businesses’ or further career advancement in the modern sense suggests a peculiarly blinkered and distorted view of what our ancestors were actually doing with their time. That’s bad enough, of course. But it also suggests a very superficial, hyper-individualistic, and misleadingly rational vision of human relationships. Why did, and do, men work? Well, in almost all cases they work because they want to better the material circumstances of their families, their communities, and the nations in which they live - and also in may cases because they feel the owe something to a particular trade or profession. They don’t generally work merely because they like the idea of having a high-flying career for its own sake (though undoubtedly there are a small number of men for whom that is true.) And this was much, much more the case for previous generations, given that people were so much more strongly embedded in a context of family, community, society, and nation in the past than they are now.

Importantly, then, even for the relatively tiny minority of men who historically were indeed in a position to ‘network’ and introduce each other to other men who would ‘help fund their businesses’ or similar - the men in the very small, upper echelons of society who were educated and had access to capital - they did this not with an eye exclusively on themselves and their own individuated careers. They did it because, to reiterate, for the most part they wanted to better the material circumstances of themselves, their families, their communities, and the nations in which they lived - and their way of doing this was, of course (how could it be otherwise?) to seek opportunities in cooperation with other men to amass more wealth and put it to more productive use. While no doubt often ambitious and animated by pride in their accomplishments, this was married to a feeling that what they were doing mattered in a much more practical, even visceral way for the people around them. Even where Gates’ depiction of the working life of men is right, then, she is in this very important sense wrong.

It makes no sense, in other words, to speak of the working world as ever having been ‘built for men’. It was built by men, but it was built for everyone, because more or less every individual man felt and understood himself to be part of a dense fabric of interrelated groups and social layers, to which what he was ‘building’ contributed. In the quintessentially ‘traditional’ model of the nuclear family, of course, he was ‘building’ to support his wife and children (and perhaps elderly parents-in-law, etc.), but he was also ‘building’ for other social purposes of wider benefit. It is of course perfectly legitimate to challenge this vision of the role of the man as the main breadwinner - goodness knows it has been challenged an awful lot - but it takes a special kind of ignorance to challenge it on the basis that the most notable thing about it was that it was designed, deliberately or inadvertently, to serve the interests of male careers for their own sakes.

And one could of course extend this analysis. I happened to be listening to the Gates interview as I crossed the Tyne Bridge (pictured above) on my way to work. Completed in 1928, in the closing days of Britain’s heyday as an industrial superpower, it is probably safely described as having been ‘built by men’. But it is used by everyone, and contributes to the local economy in a myriad of ways; the fact that it was physically built exclusively by men (supported, equally importantly, by the women who made the work possible, of course) is neither here nor there in terms of who benefits from its existence. And if you look around yourself, this will be true of almost everything that you see: the furniture, the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the device you are using - designed and built by men. But designed and built by men for everyone, not for the most part because the men who did the designing and building wanted fabulous careers for their own sake, but because they wanted to make a better world for the people they loved (including, obviously, earning more money to support their families) and the broader social causes they cared about. (I hope it goes without saying that, in the same way, the world was built by women, who were simply engaged in a different set of very important activities.)

To understand the relationship between men and women across historical time as a zero-sum game in which men excluded women from ‘funding for their businesses’ and locked them out of opportunities for career advancement is therefore so false a representation as to be almost actively perverse. Men and women, for all of human history until comparatively recently, were basically engaged in a common, cooperative cause which was to try to keep the show on the road for family, community, tribe, nation, religious institution, and so on, and ideally improve things. One can trenchantly critique the way in which the labour was divided between the sexes and how it came to be the case that ‘male’ work was celebrated and ‘female’ work denigrated, and the way in which this forced people into conforming with stereotypes which they chafed against - anybody except the lunatic fringe understands the problems there perfectly well. But that is an altogether different problem to the one Gates identifies and which some contemporary feminists describe, wherein the sexes are imagined as being engaged in a competition for spoils, and in which men always (instinctively or deliberately) connive with each other, when left to their own devices, to keep women out - or down.

The problem, then, to go back to our earlier metaphor, goes much deeper than just historical ignorance. The problem is a remarkably thin and abstract description of the past - which, indeed, represents the past simply as a set of signs and symbols to help us navigate our present. Instead of understanding things as they were, or at least trying to, we think of them on the basis of simple heuristic devices - men thought they were superior, men lionised their own achievements, men kept women out, men built the world for themselves - which we then use to manipulate our present (men built the world for themselves, so we need to support women now). The past is not a thing in its own right. The past is just a pile of fragmented stuff that we can sift through and pick over to find what is useful as a guide for what to do in the present and future. To repeat: we mistake the territory for the map, and think that our task is indeed to inhabit the map itself, where everything makes sense, where there are no contradictions or subtleties, and where we understand readily where it is we are to go.

I mentioned earlier that this poses a grave threat not just to male and female relationships (which of course it does: thinking of humanity as composed of two essentially symbolic entities, the oppressive man and the oppressed woman, or to put it in embittered terms which an ‘incel’ would recognise, the exploited man and the self-entitled woman, is a recipe for a very foul-tasting dish). It poses a threat to a free society itself. And perhaps now you can understand why. A society which thinks of itself, implicitly, as inhabiting a map, in which everything is understood in abstract isolation for its symbolic or heuristic significance rather than being part of an integrated whole, is one in which human beings themselves are conceptualised in terms only of what they represent rather than what they actually are. Such a society is one in which, indeed, the individual human being can only be really understood as a symbol to be manipulated and governed on that basis alone - a society in which the individual human being has no intrinsic value, but value only insofar as what they signify in the abstract as a ‘man’, a ‘woman’, and so on. This kind of society is one in which individual agency is not so much seen as undesirable but a kind of category error. Individuals do not have agency, because abstract representations - signs and symbols - cannot be imagined to have agency in the first place. They are objects to be moved about, designed, improved, deleted: not left to their own devices, because the ‘having of one’s own devices’ is itself an alien concept where life is understood only for what it symbolises.

The direction in which we are travelling is clear. Increasingly, we exile ourselves from the terrain, and we seek to inhabit a map. This perhaps at least provides us with the illusion of certainty and a false idea that we can navigate life more easily that way, but there is little else that is comforting about the prospect. Men and women, who have to live together, work together, respect each other, and love each other if civilisation is to endure, cannot continue to be set against each other in the way that they nowadays are. More importantly still, civilisation itself cannot endure amongst a people who cannot see things for what they are, but can only understand the world in terms of abstract representations and signs. The first stage in getting back to sanity, then requires a return to the ‘terrain’: abandoning the desire to use the past only instrumentally as a way to arrange society in the present, and allowing it to express to us its genuine richness and depth.

1. I will refer to her as ‘Gates’ throughout; I don’t know why there’s no hyphen in her double-barrelled surname, but calling her ‘French Gates’ makes it sound as though you’re referring to a decorative garden landscaping feature of some kind.