Eyre Lines

Richard Beck wrote recently about complementarianism (I link to a post; for a fuller view, follow the link from there to the previous post). Complementarianism is, briefly, the concept that men and women have different skill sets which should be recognised in the roles they play, and most importantly that women are not well equipped to be church leaders (or, indeed, leaders at all).

Beck takes issue with this stance, as indeed do I – but that isn’t the focus of this post. What Beck sees is a doctrine of ontological ineptitude; ontological meaning that it is “of the nature of” and ineptitude meaning “not fitted for” – so the idea is that women are by nature not fitted for leadership of churches (or families, come to that, which seems to me not to recognise the situation in about 80% of the marriages of friends of mine!).

Now, it goes without saying that there are some things which men are on average more “ontologically” suited to than are women. Heavy manual work is an example. However, I have an example in my own family history of an exception to this; Bessie Eyre (nee Green), who in the mid 19th century found herself a single mother due to her husband Job’s death in a mining accident, and took a job as a miller’s assistant at the appropriately named Newmillerdam. There, she was hefting bags of corn and flour around day in day out, and the story goes that when a local man made “improper advances” to her, she threw him the width of the turnpike road at Newmillerdam. A turnpike road would be wide by the standards of the day – 20 feet or more.

She was clearly an exception to the general rule that women are weaker than men (and sadly, I haven’t inherited the right genes from her and I may be an example of a man who is physically weaker than possibly the majority of women; at least that was the case when I was in junior school).

This is clearly a case where, as with almost all abilities, they are distributed in a population according to a normal distribution, a “bell curve”. I fell toward the bottom of the male “strength” bell curve, Bessie fell near the top of the “female” Bell curve. Granted, Bessie had honed her abilities through the work she did (and I probably ended up somewhat stronger than the average woman by the same route); nurture has a place along with ontology, i.e. nature. The result will still be a bell curve, but you can move yourself around in it (and most people do).

While I don’t necessarily think that women are on average less suited for leadership than men, if they were, it would be a bell curve distribution. As, I suppose, is the ability to multitask.

I occasionally deprecate myself as being incapable of multitasking “because I’m a man”. Now, I don’t actually think I am incapable, just that most of the women I’m close to are better at that than me (and similarly I tend to be better at single-minded focus than them, as in I’m better at that than the majority of them – and the exceptions know who they are!). I suppose, though, that I’m claiming there my own form of ontological incapacity. I’m claiming it on the basis of a widespread claim that men can’t multitask. And that’s as wrong as the suggestion that women can’t do heavy manual labour or lead a church.

There seem to be quite a few “men can’t…” statements buzzing around these days, in fact. I shared one recently – the Three Wise Women. Apparently we can’t cook either, or have colour sense, or generally organise a drinking session in a brewery. All those would be news to my wife, but hey, I’m ontologically incapable of doing those these days, it seems. I take these as payback for something over 2000 years of women being accused of ontological incapacity (and men only claiming it in order to get out of the housework), but they’re wrong too. Granted, I can sometimes feel slightly aggrieved that political correctness allows this to be said of men, but not that any similar thing is still said of women. Except, of course, among complementarians…

That is, of course, where a source of huge controversy arose around the publication a few years ago of the book “The Bell Curve”. I was once asked by some very bright people to read the book and develop an argument as to why it was wrong. I duly did that, and reported that I couldn’t fault the research sufficiently to say that. I could pick some holes, yes, and point out that the measurements were on a narrow skill set which didn’t really translate to general competence to run your life (and indeed, among the group some of whom asked this of me were some who had hugely failed to translate “very bright” into anything remotely resembling success in life as the world would see it), but the basic thesis was correct; the statistics were sound.

The fault there, as with complementarianism, as with “men can’t multitask” is in not making a nuanced, more accurate assessment that whatever group or groups a person falls into, they have their own abilities and should never be judged on what the standard preconceptions are of the centre of the bell curve for that particular population. They may lie anywhere along that particular bell curve, and in most respects, the bell curves for groups overlap for most of their length. I’m an outlier at the top of some bell curves, at the bottom of others and boringly average on the rest. Until you know me better, you won’t know which.

In fact, it seems to me that having worked out that everyone is not the same, those who put store by assessing ability by label are immediately saying that yes, everyone IS the same, just within the group they’re labelled as belonging to rather than humanity as a whole. If only they’d take the next step, of realising that everyone is different, and assessing them as that.

As well as being, at root, all the same, i.e. human.