An Epistemological Problem
To retrieve their male role, men must first settle on what the male role is. This also overlaps with the definition of masculinity. To know the male role requires objective truth. The truth of the male role or masculinity defines, describes, and explains it. Almost certainly, the reason behind the destruction of the objectively true male role is the denial of God Himself, at least the one and only true God. When everything is an accident, people’s opinion becomes their truth. “Their truth” is in fact not the truth and subjective opinion not a legitimate basis for truth.
God intended and still does intend for men to have a role He designed for them. The God of the Bible also created men different and to be unique from women with that particular role. I always like to say, “If that’s true.” It is true. Everyone should treat it as true. It’s not only true, but it is obviously true. Saying it’s not true is a denial of nature or natural law. God’s design, since He created everything, shows up everywhere. It’s just true.
As I already wrote in part one, the biggest problem is an epistemological one. How do we know what we know? People are just not being honest about the roles of men and women and the truth about them. The world is meant to function like God designed it and it won’t when someone denies this basic or fundamental truth.
Natural Rights
The concept of natural rights, often interchangeable with “inalienable rights” or “human rights,” says individuals possess certain rights simply by virtue of their humanity, existing prior to and independent of any government. Rights or liberties are objective because they are not arbitrary or created by humans. Historically, philosophers like John Locke argued that these rights — life, liberty, and property, or the pursuit of happiness — are derived from nature or a divine creator. This tradition limits government, the latter legitimate only insofar as it protects the pre-existing, objective rights.
In the very first chapter of the Bible we see what people have called “the cultural mandate.” I use that terminology myself. The statements there are just fundamental to human existence and success on earth. Right away man went away from this and it manifests itself in chapter three of Genesis. The earth, man’s ability to subdue it, and the environment over which he could have dominion changed with God’s curse.
The mandate includes replenishing the earth, but the focus here is subdue and have dominion. God expects man to subdue and have dominion over the earth. To do that, God created male and female, whom need to replenish to accomplish that. Man lost the dominion, God says, because He abdicated headship, that is, hearkened unto the voice of His wife, rather than lead and protect her as a function of his and her roles.
Social Contract
Scripture anticipates the battle between the sexes since the fall of mankind into sin. Just before, at, and shortly after the founding of the United States, the seeds of the dissolution of the defining roles of men and women sprang from a social contract theory, an alternative to natural rights. It posits that no person has a divine right to rule another. Instead, governing authority derives from an agreement, explicit or implicit, among the people who choose to form a society. Ultimate authority rest with the people themselves.
The core premise of social contract theory is that moral and political rules are human creations resulting from an agreement, either explicit or hypothetical, among individuals. The social contract shifts the source of all legitimate authority to the will or consent of the governed. If the “right” or “just” system is simply the one rational people agree upon for mutual advantage, then the standards of right and wrong are inter-subjective, shared by a group, rather than objective, existing independently of human minds.
Early social contract theorists like Thomas Hobbes explicitly connected the state of nature and the social contract to a rejection of objective morality. Hobbes argued that in the “state of nature,” terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are merely reflections of an individual’s subjective appetites and aversions. They have no objective meaning outside of what a person desires or fears.
Failure with the Social Contract
When individuals enter the contract, they create laws and rules (morality) not because these laws are objectively true, but because they are the most rational means to ensure security and self-preservation. The rules are a pragmatic tool, legitimate only to the extent they fulfill the goal of the agreement, not a discovery or reception of a universal truth. This perspective suggests that no single set of laws or moral beliefs is universally or objectively true. Instead, morality is relative to social approval and utility within that culture, not its correspondence to a reality external to the contract.
For instance, today someone, maybe a woman, or others, might call a man a misogynist, essentially a woman hater, because according to natural rights proceeding from God a man rejects identical roles for men and women. By doing so, they assert that he denies equal rights to women. What he says is that God created men and women with different roles, and even though women are equal in essence to men, they are not equal in role to men. Opposition to this buttresses the elimination of a male role in culture.
Optimal Treatment with Natural Rights
If women receive a role based on a subjective social contract because there are more of them than men, then men could change the contract by force. In the end, with no ultimate judge of truth and lies, good and evil, everyone can do that which is right in their own eyes. Western civilization based on natural rights, found in scripture, resulted in optimal treatment of women. If women want to destroy the very basis for that treatment, they can have instead what men can take by force, enslaving women and receiving real misogyny. Men could rip up the present contract for one favorable to them.
I advocate for a natural rights approach, because it’s true. With that, we turn back to the Bible and sort through what it means to be a man and a woman. Men get their role back. They admit the failure of humanism and its inferior life and well-being result for everyone. Many today together assess something of a culture approaching a dumpster fire. It won’t get better without admitting the sin of again abdicating the male role like Adam in the garden. Mankind then can subdue and have dominion, build a society in the nature of God with truth, goodness, and beauty.
Today you will hear a moderate embrace the reality that men and women are different. Even though they probably don’t know it, they think that men and women obtain their rights from the consent of the governed. A society will not have a true either belief or practice of a male role based on a social contract. Everything must revert back to the truth of the Bible, the foundation of Western Civilization. This will change everything in this conversation and return a nation to the possibility of optimal benefits that God intended.
More to Come