The Revolt of the Primitive: An Inquiry into the Roots of Political Correctness Revised Edition

Very insightful, but perhaps already a little dated and specific to the political correctness in the US, still very much worth reading as many of the views and insights espoused here are crucial to our understanding of organisations and ourselves. Especially the examination from a psychodynamic perspective of protest and counter culture is a worthwhile and courageous endeavour

To me, the riddle of feminism poses only half of a conundrum.
Why are women feminists? Why do they bash men so readily? Well, why do wolves have sharp teeth? The better to eat you with, of course.
Conversely, why do women untruthfully DENY that they are feminists or male-bashers? For the same reason that the wolf doesn't show his teeth. It might frighten away one's quarry.
There's just no mystery about female motivation for the war on men and surely no need for an explanatory book.
But why do many MEN become feminists and self-bashers? What makes men, large numbers of them, adopt a philosophy of shame and self-hate? Why do men follow the women in their lives to that evolutionary blind alley?
That is TRULY a mystery which I hoped that Howard Schwartz's "Revolt of the Primitive" would answer.
Schwartz's analysis, as others have noted, is primarily a Freudian one, to which he adds his own flourish.
He postulates that men go into the outside world and seek to tame it in order to impress women and concurrently as a means of making it more closely resemble the world of the primordial mother that they long for (and that girls and women are more easily linked to).
He further suggests that as women enter the work force and other institutions outside the home in large numbers, they see these differently from the men who understand the hardship and seeks to gain the respect of the women by engaging in it for their sake.
Women see these institutions from the point of view of the primordial mother herself, who unrealistically expects the world of work to resemble her own primarily maternal sphere, a sphere "where the expression of her nurturing power could be given its freest expression".
As Schwartz explains, women treat the revelation that the outside world isn't truly like that, not with a concession to reality, but with hostility towards the men who inhabit it, rejecting any notion of gratitude for the sacrifices made by men within that world. Rather, women blame men for the world's flaws.
And here we come to what Schwartz would view as the answer to the riddle of male feminism. Men respond to the rejection of women not with remonstrations for their ingratitude but with fearful acquiescence to the female view. To do otherwise would be to incur the wrath of the primordial mother.
As Schwartz describes, "He must therefore...follow her lead, not move from her project, never question her claim that were it not for the father, her life...would have been perfect. In all of this, he relinquishes any possibility he has of an emotional life as a competent male adult, substituting instead the idea that male adulthood is the root of his problem."
The male feminist as the eternally childlike naif - I like it. This is the triumph of the revolt of the primitive - the conquest of the primordial mother.
Schwartz specifically looks at several issues through the prism of this analysis: martial dissolutions and domestic violence (in both of them, actual male guilt is routinely overstated and female guilt understated), workplace conditions (the myths of the "pay gap" and the "glass ceiling"), political correctness on campus, and women in combat.
Schwartz is on the right track when he talks about the dictatorial reign of political correctness on campus. The substitution of feelings and group-think for rigorous academic critique does indeed smack of a triumph of the feminine (the primordial mother, if you will) over the masculine, even as female students pile up a super-numerical advantages on campus.
And the feminist assault on the military taking place under the Tailhook banner - of course, it's a thinly-veiled assault on male sexuality. To recognize that, one would not even need to be familiar with the specific examples that Schwartz provides.
But Schwartz's analysis isn't quite complete. Male self-hatred today is toxic, absolutely toxic. Anyone who surfs Usenet can see that men have not only accepted as true the charge that they are oppressors (which ready acceptance might be accounted for by Schwartz's analysis) but also, as true, the charge that they are actually inferior to women.
Men have, by and large, accepted all of the ugly descriptions that feminazi junk science imposes on them: weak-kneed sissies incapable of giving birth and therefore incapable of dealing with pain and stress (though, as Schwartz shows, it's WOMEN who refuse to accept the world as it is), Y-chromosome mutants who are subject to genetic disease and early death. The "weaker sex". And so on.
Schwartz's "revolt of the primitive" might explain a certain measure of weary male passivity and acquiescence in the face of the female onslaught. But it seems horribly inadequate as an explanation for sexual suicide and for intense and widespread male self-hatred.
Then too, Schwartz's description of the world would have us believe that with the triumph of the primordial mother, the feminine is in ascendance and the masculine is in retreat.
But the masculine ISN'T in retreat, not at all. Our popular culture is littered with karate-kicking, groin-stomping men inhabiting the bodies of women such as Jennifer Lopez. Snarling, tight-lipped, soccer playing "role models" Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain preach "fierceness" as a standard for little girls to emulate. Hairy-lipped small-breasted women put on their gym pants and actually run marathons and triathlons, but only when they're not practicing their boxing moves.
The masculine isn't in retreat but the purveyors of culture honor it ONLY when it finds expression in the actions of WOMEN.
It's really not the feminine that's in ascendance, of course; it's androgyny. Our cultural gurus are busy turning men into women and women into men and it's ANDROGYNY, no less than the primordial mother, which represents the real horror. I find nothing in Schwartz's book to account for this development.
Your patient is dying, doctor. You need to recognize ALL of the symptoms before your diagnosis can be completed.

I recall buying Revolt of the Primitive when it first came out in 2001, and, to put it mildly, it was not what I expected. Certainly it was full of excellent quotes and vignettes, but I found the psychoanalytic theory daunting. Indeed, Schwartz's point of view is not one which will gain much admiration from the public at large, yet it is extremely enlightening. This book explains many of the paradoxes endemic to political correctness, and will give aid to those of us who long for its racist, sexist, heterophobic death. Before cracking the cover, I had never heard such an excellent explanation for why good men cowered before feminists. Although many of Dr. Schwartz's proofs are abstract in nature, they are highly convincing. We all wish for scientific studies to be conducted and irrefutable evidence presented concerning most of the things in which we fervently believe, but, many times, truth can be found outside the experimental setting. We get far more Veritas in Revolt of the Primitive than we would from many months of study within a university afflicted with cultural Marxism. Dr. Schwartz should be proud. This is an outstanding book.

Two things I wish I had know about this book up front were that the pricing is genuinely inexplicable and that it is a Freudian psychoanalytic approach to analyzing the subject of feminism.

Feminism is but one branch of modern "political correctness", a deceptively bland term that refers to a way of thinking which follows inevitably if one assumes humans are mechanically and accidentally derived automatons (as compared to Christianity, which recognizes humans as being spiritually designed in the image of God, thus of intrinsic worth despite choosing to sin).

The actual roots of P.C. feminism are thus faith in the presupposition of naturalism, not the Freudian fictions the author claims. P.C. people see right and wrong as being defined only by human power; subordination to God is anathema, the idea offending their prideful natures. They prefer the instrinsically unprovable (and contradictory) assumption there are only undirected, natural things, disregarding the evidence of life and history, that God that created men and women with definite natures and roles.

Because the book's approach is Freudian, it can't really get at the root it claims to. Interestingly, it often uses religious wordings like "sin" and "holy war", but strips the ideas of content, guaranteeing an inadequate analysis. Perhaps the author also starts by assuming naturalism is true.

While descriptions of the feminization of the military and other concrete events is good, better understanding can be had in Veith's "Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview", which traces the development of fascism over the centuries into modern institutions such as Political Correctness, feminism and post-modernism.

Feminist thinking shares much with classical, pre-Christian paganism (thus the frequent links with witchcraft, goddess and nature worship), so the author's recognition of it as a form of primitivism is at least close to the mark. Feminists think about women using the same pattern of reasoning that fascists do with the nation-state. Men (or Jews) are toxic while women (The Motherland) are benevolent and loving, yet oppressed. Institutions (human power) must remade to halt oppression of women (i.e. different results). A utopian vision is built around what is imagined would happen if women (Aryan super-race) could properly run things, as they are obviously better suited to do. The actual result is a society dedicated to shaming boys for displaying any behavior that leads to different outcomes.

For example, flip on one of the news networks and you will quickly see stories about, say, how women suffer from cervical cancer more than they need to because they are so busy taking care of others they have no time for their own health. That they suffer more from breast cancer than they need to because they don't want to appear vulnerable in their "male-dominated" workplace. That is, they suffer from one form of cancer BECAUSE they are so good; they suffer another form of cancer BECAUSE men are so bad.

After permeating culture with such negative biases, one ends up with millions of young boys being medicated daily with Ritalin because they are boys and the deck becoming so stacked against them that male college attendance is dropping rapidly; 8.4 million women to 6.7 million men in 1996 and projected at 9.2/6.2 ratio by 2007. Apparently, sitting quietly and passively in chairs is not just how women learn, but the universal method boys must accept too, even if they need to be drugged to do so.

While I don't recommend it, the book's accounts of specific events is fascinating (but perhaps instead see "The Myth of Male Power"); to a large extent, the reshaping of institutions by feminists occurs behind the scenes since if people knew how bizzare the intentions, it would never fly.

Reading the book did improve my focus on the white-collar phenomenon of women who are hired out of college and given high visibility jobs managing others more experienced, then rapidly promoted. Within a couple years, a local newspaper inevitably does the full page story revolving around the fact they are women a traditionally male field. Then invitations to the White House for ceremonies, and membership on a board that advises upper-level management on women's issues, functioning behind the scenes, almost like a self-reinforcing Trotskyite cell. Meanwhile, the males are often left trying to figure out what the woman actually did to obtain such attention. Not a good situation. Elevation of women simply because they are women while denigrating and medicating men for being energetic, then discarding them to prisons if that fails will eventually erode away the foundations of civilized societies.