I'm reading Fantasia of the Unconscious by D.H. Lawrence;
Lawrence was half crazy. And much of what he wrote of cultural criticism was almost completely incomprehensible. But if you can get through the clutter of Jungian and Freudian psychology and anatomical and metaphysical free form speculation you can find an underlying imprint of penetrating insight into the condition of modern society in this group of essays.
Amongst the most interesting is his theory that the authentic natural human condition, its primordial archetypes, have been completely sabotaged by modern society and education.. imposing a stereotype of intellectual affectation over the primitive, sensual pulse of lfe. Most notably this is reflected the role reversal of men and women.
Women, according to Lawrence, have taken on the energetic, active, effective and directive roles in our society. Men the passive, sensitive, all sympathetic, nurturing and responsive modes. It is women in our society who initiate and men who respond. He predicts this will produce all sorts of unanticipated and potentially catastrophic consequences. Gender he asserts is bred in the bone, their roles prescribed, integral and immutable.
It can't be totally dismissed seeing the delusions and neuroses that have developed in our modern culture.. the explosion of homosexuality, 'transgenderism', the collapse of the nuclear family. It is seen in the Feminist ideology, which radically inverts the model of women to an ideal of inependent career woman.. aborter of the primal instinct to procreate, and emancipated from the responsibility of wife and mother, the vessel of life.
Given that these essays were writtin in the 1920s, they seem to be downright prescient.
