August, 1998

Dear ICE Subscriber:

When it's time to cut firewood, women call on men. When it's time to set the thermostat, women can do it themselves. (In the 11 years that I lived in my home in Texas, I could never set the thermostat. The people who designed it had apparently studied programming at a VCR center. My wife had to set it; she could figure it out.)

Electricity has harnessed enormous power and has made it available to anyone who can read a manual or flip a switch. A society built in terms of electricity offers fingertip power that does not discriminate sexually.

We did not think about the sexual implications of electricity, but they do exist. Electricity undermines most of the advantages that physical strength offers. Electricity opened the doors of employment to women as nothing ever has. The ability to perform work has depended less and less on physical strength. Dexterity may count in some jobs, but dexterity does not offer an advantage to one sex over another in most jobs.

Electricity has made women's tasks physically easier in the home: the vacuum cleaner vs. the rug beater, the washing machine vs. the wash board, the clothes dryer vs. the clothes line. It has made it possible for women to perform basic household tasks more rapidly. This has opened up hours in the day that can be used to generate income outside the home. The auto industry has provided the escape vehicle.

The modern work day is just as long or longer, and surely more intense for female executives-mothers, but it is far more productive in terms of the quantity of work accomplished. Closets are full of clothes. If clothes had to be hand washed and hung out to dry, there would be smaller closets.

If the power grid goes down, it's 1850 again, but without the skills and tools suitable to 1850. Will it go down? Better put: What evidence is there that it will stay up? There are 7,800+ power companies in the United States, and none of them is compliant.

If the power grid goes down permanently in 2000, the lives of women who survive will get physically harder. Life will be more like great grandma's. The number of choices will shrink: marriage partners, divorce, travel, education, employment. We will all be poorer. But life may be better. It depends on people's faith during hard times.

The churches are not preparing people for the great transformation. It is not merely a matter of encouraging families to buy extra food. It is a matter of preparing them for a comprehensive social readjustment, especially between the sexes. We will have to learn on the job or in the unemployment lines. The ways that we got things accomplished before 2000 will disappear. We will have to narrow our horizons, relearn old ways, and stop relying on impersonal servants — electricity, computers, internal combustion engines, etc. — to do most of our hard work for us.

As we have become freed from physical strain, we have been subjected to emotional strain. We have worried more and sweated less than any society in history. The curse of sweat lost its threat in the age of air conditioning, a post-World War II era. As Texas author J. Frank Dobie said of air conditioning in the 1930's, "Texas will be ruined. The yankees will be able to live here."

Those who will pay the heaviest price will be divorced women. In the next decade, fathers will bring abandoned daughters and grandchildren back into their homes. They will vote for politicians who reimpose laws that restrict divorce and impose heavy penalties on husbands who abandon their wives and children. The era of no-fault divorce is the invention of philandering male lawyers and the feminist movement. Both groups will be stripped of power in 2000 and beyond. Both groups will suffer an unprecedented backlash.

The End of Feminism

On February 1, 2000, the feminist movement will no longer exist.

The breakdown of the division of labor will create a social crisis unlike any we have seen before in the West. All across the world, the moron machines will do exactly as they have been told, and the results will be unpredictable, catastrophic, and total.

Jobs that are today being done by machines will either be done by people or not be done at all in 2001. A vast shrinking of specialization will occur. The "niche" markets will disappear.

When the worldwide job market collapses in the digital confusion, women will be fired by the tens of millions, as will men. But most women will not be rehired except at low wages. There will be no more Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, no more quotas, no more tokens. Employers will hire men as an insurance policy in case they lose their own jobs. Any attempt by the government to bar men from jobs in the name of sexual equality will be met by fierce political resistance by men. Politicians who try to say otherwise will have their careers ended at the next election.

Women will return to the home. The basic division of labor will reappear: women will be homemakers; men will be breadwinners. Both jobs will become more demanding than today. The fast food industry will disappear. The day care industry will disappear.

A massive reallocation of existing resources will begin: water, food, and protection. We don't think of protection much today, but we will be thinking of little else if we have water and food. Protection will become an exceedingly valuable resource.

This is why the feminist movement is in its last days. Women always seek protection. When the social division of labor, which gives them the bulk of their protection, collapses in 2000, they will get most of any protection they have from men. The moment the institutional basis of women's self-protection disappears — the modern job market — the value of protection will rise. This means the value of marriage for women will rise.

The key passage in the Bible that relates to a shift back to protection for women is Isaiah 3 and 4. I have never heard a sermon on it. It is politically incorrect as few passages are. It has to do with God's corporate negative sanctions on perverse society:

Moreover the LORD saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet: Therefore the LORD will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the LORD will discover their secret parts. In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon, The chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers, The bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings, The rings, and nose jewels, The changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins, The glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the vails. And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty. Thy men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war. And her gates shall lament and mourn; and she being desolate shall sit upon the ground. And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach. In that day shall the branch of the LORD be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and comely for them that are escaped of Israel. And it shall come to pass, that he that is left in Zion, and he that remaineth in Jerusalem, shall be called holy, even every one that is written among the living in Jerusalem: When the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the midst thereof by the spirit of judgment, and by the spirit of burning (Isa. 3:16-4:4).

The fashionable ladies of one era become the desperate ladies of the next. The up-scale ladies of one era become the down-scale ladies of the next. Times had seemed good; then they seem bad. The result is a great purging. The third phase is a time of restoration.

The liberating effects of electricity will be sorely missed by those who have been forcibly unplugged by the moron machines. But for every loss, there is a gain, though only for the survivors. For every curse, there is grace. A rural community is a more closely knit community than an urban community, which is more densely packed. A marriage whose partners face life-and-death tasks throughout the year is more serious than one which faces innumerable minor choices. The plow is a symbol of the former, the channel flipper of the latter.

Legitimizing the New, Old Arrangements

Most pastors will not prepare their members for what is coming until they see TV news commentators worry on screen about y2k. The Presbyterian Church in America did adopt a recommendation at its 1998 General Assembly that local congregations prepare for y2k, but this is voluntary, and there were no specifics mentioned. (Specifics are what keep recommendations from passing.)

As for the social implications for the work force, for family allocation of responsibility, and for the feminist movement, we will hear nothing from the pulpits until the market has begun to produce the sweeping changes I have outlined. The free market, not a government bureaucracy, will determine how work is allocated in 2000 and beyond. The pastors will baptize the new arrangements, i.e., the old fashioned arrangements, after it is clear who controls the tithes and offerings.

The job market is the source of legitimacy in this society. "It's the economy, stupid" is the catch phrase of the era. When the economy becomes worse than it has ever been in modern history, the de-legitimizing force of unemployment and newly found poverty will undermine all of the social and political shibboleths of this age.

At that point, those who come in the name of a higher legitimacy will get a hearing. If they can explain why Deuteronomy has greater economic authority than Adam Smith or even Milton Friedman — can such things be? — they will get a hearing, if they can show why adherence to Deuteronomy would have enabled men to avoid the curse of y2k.

If the comprehensive crises generated by the Millennium Bug are seen by most men as the outcome of a priesthood of faceless programmers a generation ago, then men will be thrown without psychological defenses into a world in which randomness is king and men's dreams are like wind. This is the world officially taught by evolutionary humanism, but it is not the world of the Bible.

We must call men back to faith in a covenantal God who brings corporate historical sanctions in terms of His revealed law. They will not listen today. They will listen in 2001.

Sincerely,