The Gift of Undeniable Failure

Me 🤝 St. Edith Stein

Two notes: For New Yorkers opposed to euthanasia, Governor Kathy Hochul still hasn’t signed the euthanasia bill that passed the legislature. In the first week of December, there will be candlelit vigils in Albany, Buffalo, and NYC asking her not to give the blessing of the law to suicide.

For everyone, Xan DeSanctis Marr reviewed The Dignity of Dependence in the January issue of National Review: “The world is the wrong shape for everyone. Sargeant considers how dependence and vulnerability mark the lives of men in ways less noticeable but no less real.”

Your best bet for the book is still direct from Notre Dame University Press, where it’s half price with the code “14GIVEBKS.” If you’re getting it for someone for Christmas, I’d love to know :)

Photo by Conor O'Nolan on Unsplash

The Free Press ran a recent symposium on “The Great Feminization” and asked me to contribute. Since the podcast Helen and I did let me lay out a lot of my objections to her thesis, I wanted to focus more of my comment on a positive alternative.

I care a lot about whether institutions have habits of truthseeking (not for nothing were two of my previous jobs at a group teaching “defensive driving for your brain” and another one running debates on college campuses). So, I don’t think the problem isn’t women, what is making it hard for us to love the truth more than our pride, and how could we grow in this strength?

Helen Andrews’ “Great Feminization” hypothesis would benefit from a little more of the concrete, data-driven analysis that she thinks working women neglect. If she is worried that “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female,” why have industries already dominated by women (pharmacy, veterinary medicine) not collapsed? I choose those industries specifically because their failures should be noisy, producing a visible body count. If women persistently, and perniciously, prioritize “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition,” I’d expect to see visible harms in less politically contentious arenas.

Like Andrews, I’m concerned by institutions becoming “oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth,” but I’d like to propose an intervention that doesn’t depend on the office gender ratio. Our education system and helicopter style of parenting are too risk-averse, harming boys and girls alike. Children need room to take ownership of projects, with no adult safety net, and the freedom to fail. The habit of truth-seeking is built up by encounters with the consequences of falling short of what Matthew Crawford calls “the infallible judgment of reality.”

In college, I got part of my education from my classes, but some of my most critical formation in character came from shop class, where miscalibrating a computer numerical control meant my steam engine parts didn’t interlock, and from costume crew, where lazy construction could leave a dancer naked. Everyone, male or female, needs the experience of failing unambiguously to understand why rigor is required.

Having written that in early November, imagine my delight when I found similar themes in St. Edith Stein’s Essays on Women. (Finishing the collection this week means I’m currently 10 for 12 on my 2025 reading list).

She picks up this theme several times across the essays, and this is from “The Significance of Women’s Intrinsic Value in National Life” (emphasis mine)

How is it then possible to extricate the purified valuable feminine character from the raw material of feminine singularity with all its faults and weaknesses, of which, as daughters of Eve, we all have a share?

In the first instance, a good natural method for this is thoroughly objective work. Every such work, no matter of what kind, whether housework, a trade, science or anything else, necessitates submitting to the laws of the matter concerned; the whole person, thoughts just as all moods and dispositions, must be made subordinate to the work. And whoever has learned this, has become objective, has lost something of the hyper-individuality and has attained a definite freedom of self; at the same time she has attained an inner depth—she has attained a basis of self-control. Indeed, every young girl should receive a basic vocational formation for the sake of these great personal gains, quite aside from any economic compulsion; and after this formation, she should hold a position which completely fulfills her.

You can talk about seeking out objective work in more masculine- or feminine coded ways.

Are you in the arena, wrestling the material world?

Are you becoming docile to reality?

It’s both, obviously. And open to both sexes in either (and preferably both) of these spirits. Doing objective, physical work, whether it’s mending, cooking, or building always prompts me to consider myself in relation to the world. I neither author reality, nor do I passively observe. I am a steward of what I’ve been gifted.

In an ordinary day, what do you do that feel like objective work, with the possibility of unambiguous failure?

In intellectual or social domains, where it’s easier to self-deceive, how do you maintain a habit of preferring truth to comfort?

If not more physical work with unambiguous failures, how would you try to strengthen an orientation toward truth-seeking in a community?