Ilana Mercer - Gender Politics

I'd never heard of Ilana Mercer. Today I read this quote on Samizdata

The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.

and, out of idle curiosity, hit the link to its source. The speaker of the words above was Milton Friedman in his introduction to (surprise, surprise) The Road to Serfdom.

The speaker of the words below was Ilana Mercer. This is a small selection - I could reprint the entire interview with approval.

On what what feminism has inflicted on us all:

There’s the “smaller” stuff—the deconstruction of text and art in the academy, with the result that students are robbed of great literature and art. They learn that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and T. S. Eliot were chauvinist pigs, and they analyze great works of art through a grim and distorting prism. A cultural Marxism of sorts.

In my book I point out that “the great and singular achievements of the West—from ancient Greece, through the Enlightenment, to the industrial and scientific revolutions of modern times—were products of a historically unprecedented union of rationality, morality, objectivity, and passion.” But we’ve expunged reason, objectivity, individualism, and self-responsibility from our institutions. In their place we’ve elevated irrationalism, subjectivity, collectivism, self-indulgence, statism.

What about equality?

So the only equality I want to see is equality under the law. If women ever make up 50 percent of physics and engineering departments, I’ll know that the artificial—and coercive, because it deploys state power—notion of gender equality has triumphed completely.

So, I reject gender equality in the sense you mean it. Gender justice (that’s perhaps a better term) will come about when a natural aristocracy is allowed to rise to the top—individuals who constitute the best of man and woman alike. For this to occur, government must stay out of hiring, firing, and legislating admissions into institutes of learning.

Is it love that I feel, or just great gratitude?

Tagged: Culture, Feminism