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The Real Oldest Profession
The world’s oldest profession is giving bad advice to women. The serpent in the Garden of Eden invented it and found an easy mark in our First Mama, Eve. Being a biblical scholar and expert on myth and culture, I suspect it went something like this:
Serpent: Look at you collecting all those wonderful herbs and berries. Does Adam appreciate all you do for him?
Eve: Of course he does. He says I am the best part of all creation.
Serpent: But he is off all day naming animals, plants and even stars, obsessively getting to know things. He spent most of yesterday afternoon walking with God and watching bees. Bees! Seriously, shouldn’t he be spending that time with you?
Eve: Learning and affirming all of nature is his job, silly.
Serpent: But why not learn it all in one fell swoop. Isn’t that what the fruit of that one tree is for?
Eve: We are forbidden. It would be wrong and selfish to try to gain such power.
Serpent: But you would not be doing it for yourself but for Adam. You are the least selfish creature in the whole garden.
Eve: Oh, Stop it. You’re embarrassing me.
Serpent: You know Adam is obviously too hung up on his big-deal mission to properly think about you or what is best for both of you. Maybe you need to be the one to do it for the both of you. What could be more loving, especially if done by someone like you who never wants anything for herself and only thinks of him and of the power you both deserve? Together, of course.
Cue the angelic flaming sword SWAT team to stand by because that apple is coming down…
Why do young women accept the sheer barbarism of hook-up culture? Or the post-Roe world where a baby is just her body/her problem rather than a miraculous moral and personal connection to a father, families, and community? Our sexual mores and culture seem as if they were imposed for the convenience of Harvey Weinstein, Bills Clinton and Cosby, and lounge lizards everywhere.
And the scope of American female suckerhood is widening. Boys who “identify” as girls are winning track meets while feminists still don’t seem to get that the identity politics they promoted eventually comes for us all. Victimhood celebrations in the wake of #MeToo also mean that male CEOs will have nothing to do with, much less mentor young women for fear of accusations. The decision by women to privilege the rantings of male-hating harridans in academia and literature poisons possibilities of intimacy, commitment, and sanity.
Women also appear to be more suspectable to the political rhetoric of fear and protection. Political operatives study and scheme about whether “soccer moms” can be made more afraid of terrorism, economic collapse, crime, or catastrophic climate change but the choice to deploy a fear/protection pitch is the constant. Young single women, trained to be terrified of commitment, trained to crave ‘safe spaces’ and feeling pressured to delay reproduction indefinitely out of fear of financial stress over and above tuition load debt are being groomed for fear/protection politics for life.
We have dystopian anti-communities in the inner cities largely because the federal government aggressively and successfully sought to outbid poor working men for possession of women and children. Upscale white women now increasingly vote for the same deal: guarantees of income and health care, guarantees of job security, and assistance of all kinds in lieu of the more uncertain adventure of building a life and family with a man.
The fruit on that tree now claims to be security, safety, job satisfaction, and the promise of uninterrupted material well-being. An awful lot of women don’t seem to have learned much since that first bogus sales pitch that got us all into the current mess. Thank God, for the spectacular exceptions to that tendency and if there was ever a time for them to rise to the forefront, it’s now.
Published in General
Maybe so. I’ve long had the… well, maybe not argument, perhaps “thought experiment”… that, if women in general do – as seems to be the case – tilt towards socialism regardless of all the accumulated evidence that it is a Bad Idea, then is it really worth the crashing of civilization as we’ve come to know it, so that women can feel good about themselves, “empowered” or whatever, for 100 years or so?
That is an example of knowledge that happened to be gained by evil means, which could have been attained WITHOUT evil means. That the evil means arrived there first, seems like it shouldn’t automatically disqualify the knowledge obtained. And now, there’s probably no need to do it again, by other means, even if those means involved spending a lot more time, money, and other resources.
I don’t think Eve is tempted by the possibility of acquiring knowledge. I think she’s tempted by the thought of being equal with God. She tempted to put a desire for power before obedience to God.
No God told Adam “to tend and keep” it.
No, I couldn’t have come up with this on my own. It’s in the New Testament:
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever.
We tend to think that Eden was… rather large… so that sounds more like make-work for one man rather than actually keeping the garden tended.
Nope
There was probably a lot less sweat of the brow involved before the Fall.
Maybe, but that would seem to support my contention that the Garden of Eden didn’t really need “tending” to begin with.
Unless you agree with Ensign Chekov that the Garden of Eden was a lovely place just outside Moscow. :-)
If you were a dog, people might actually like having you around. Instead, you are the village atheist, who drops into religion threads for some reason.
Arguing with you is like arguing with a leftist. I’m wasting my time here.
Hey, lighten up you guys and define some terms. “Knowledge” here is more about the use of cognition to advance egotism and false pride rather than some defined content or facts.
Knowledge is good. As Aquinas argued, there is unity in truth—nothing that is true threatens or contradicts anything that is true. If you see such a contradiction, you are the problem, not the truths you misunderstand. Thus Endeth the lesson. Preach Mode off.
Cheers.
The weird thing about the story is that the tree of Life doesn’t get mentioned until Adam and Eve are being expelled from the garden. But it’s mentioned in a way that implies it was always there among the trees from which they were allowed to eat and they never happened to eat from it.
I have to apologize to Old Bathos for my earlier comment in which I said the post was “silly.” It’s been on my mind ever since I wrote it. I saw your post right after I had left my Cape Cod gardeners’ Facebook page, and I was still chuckling at the joke one of the men gardeners had made about naming the rabbits in his yard. :-) When I skimmed your post, I was thinking, Oh, boy, this is going to be very funny when the women on Ricochet read this. :-)
I am sorry that I said something that sounded critical. :-)
I am far too narcissistic to have been wounded in such an offhand way. I naturally assumed you were referring to other people’s comments. Moi “silly”? Pshaw. Cheers.
I have argued the same, though not nearly half so well as Old Bathos put it, and have heard others make this point. But I had no idea that it had been discussed in connection with the Moynihan Report.
I would agree that men have a better sense of humor, they’re better at spotting jokes. Plus, men tend to find it funny when women aren’t even trying to be funny (maybe especially).
But women’s instincts are probably better. When I make ladies laugh, I know I delivered a truly funny line, and they won’t give an inch if it doesn’t cut it.