Everything Sargeant calls on the state to do is of a piece with the standard demands of her analogues on the left. Indeed, if what we are seeking is a society oriented around dependence and care, the left offers to provide even more fully for the beleaguered modern woman by deconstructing capitalism and replacing it with a need-based economy that socializes the “burdens of care.” Sargeant wants the state to limit the tyrannical demands of private employers on workers’ time and to subsidize the non-market care work of (mainly) women. This would “accommodate the exuberant outpouring of love and risk-taking so many of us want to undertake for the sake of another” without imposing all the economic disadvantages that absence from the labor force now entails for women. But why not do women one better and replace the tyrannical private employers hamstrung by a benevolent state with a benevolent state employer that ensures everyone has the time and resources to exuberantly pour out their love on whomever and in whatever way they wish?
That is one of the dumbest paragraphs in what has to be the worst piece I have ever read from The New Atlantis. When Koganzin says “why not do women one better,” there is no conceivable way to understand what she could possibly mean by “one.” Nothing in the gap between Sargeant’s plea and the full blown erasure of private employment could ever be reduced to “one” anything — even for the sake of a poorly chosen idiom.
Yesterday On Monday, while I was trying to think of a satisfyingly sarcastic parody of Koganzin’s logic, I came home to find the summer issue of the magazine on the counter, which includes a little tit for tat between her and Sargeant.
Here’s Sargeant:
If Koganzon is looking for a defense against totalizing solutions, she will find it in my book’s praise of embracing the natural volatility of life. Fertility and family life cannot be made tame or trivial. As I write, “A woman’s fertility and biology generate friction in a world that demands smooth stability.” Women should not accept demands to flatten ourselves to better fit standardized solutions, whether from the state or society at large. I prefer the approach of disability activists, who push for adaptive designs, which can adjust to suit the user.
And here’s an example from Sargeant’s book:
Reform is disruptive as well — just as it is when a home is flooded with sewage after a storm and all the drywall must be ripped out and reset. But there’s no health that comes in living in denial amid the debris. Day by day, the most vulnerable bear the costs of living in a society that is delusional about dependence.
The alternative is actively choosing the disruption that allows [economic] growth to occur. As Sharon Rose Christner observes amid the nightly pilgrimage of the poor to the Italian policlinico, a “yes” to need is a step into the unknown. “We must know, when we call ourselves merciful, when we designate ourselves as people or institutions of mercy, when we display our neat, quick, beautiful merciful acts in the day: people will see them and come to us for mercies we have not yet shown. Mercies that, like the night, are longer, quieter, stranger.”
Clearing away the laws that limit care and beginning to treat dependence as ordinary and expected will involve costs and benefits we cannot yet anticipate. A person pinioned by chains will long for freedom without being able to fully imagine it. The aim is more than ending the hostility to and degradation of the vulnerable and those who love them. Our society should make a positive and generous shift. We need to go beyond neutrality to anticipate and accommodate the exuberant outpouring of love and risk taking so many of us want to undertake for the sake of another.
As Freddie deBoer has argued, you don’t need “rabid socialist sentiments or anti-capitalist assumptions. You can get here purely through a pragmatic consideration of the underlying reality.” The difference is that, unlike deBoer, Sargeant doesn’t seem to me the least bit interested in “socialism.” And unlike Koganzin, Sargeant seems perfectly capable of an aim toward social legislation that appreciates the human being for what it is without getting bogged down in — or, more accurately, spooked by — “socialism.”
A brief look at Koganzin’s resume makes me think she’s still someone I would take very seriously. But my goodness what a bad faith review she offers.