Another zealot for re-inventing the human being

I'd never thought about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg much per se.  I knew she was all about empowering women, according to her definition of that phrase, but she was one of many who have made that their central cause.

Then I caught the 60 Minutes interview with her the other day and now the Mona Charen column about her at Townhall.  As I say, Sandberg's point, as a TED talker and book author, is hardly original, but the way she frames it makes for a great launching point into an examination of what this term "women's empowerment" is tacitly assumed to mean.

For all her fancy degrees and experience in business and government, Sandberg doesn't seem to have thought about the sweep of human history much.  Here is Western society - American society, specifically - at a point where women participate and lead in decidedly unprecedented numbers, and her whole thrust is to point out all the areas in which they are under-represented.

Sandberg wants to come across as being all for strong families and well-adjusted kids and genuine warmth in real human relationships, but she's really coming to the same point as the more dime-story level of motivational speaker would come in the heyday of "you-can-have-it-all" exhortation (which, led, ironically, to a wave of women's-magazine articles looking at whether one can indeed have it all, as well as innumerable sidebars on "tips for relieving stress and taking 'me' time").  And when push comes to shove in the attempt to maintain that precarious balance, something winds up giving. Charen sees what that something is for Sandberg:

If Sandberg wants to agitate to help women think better of themselves and get the raises that are due to them, good for her.

But that's not the whole agenda. Though denying that she is judging any woman's decisions and acknowledging that she struggles with the work/family balance every day, there is a planted assumption in her advice to women that work should prevail over family. Noting the small numbers of women in top executive positions at Fortune 500 firms, Sandberg says, "The problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out."

Charen also notes that society's go-getter women are indeed taking into account the female prediliction for making sure personal relationships, particularly those within the family, are successful:

Women students at Yale Law School, for example, have published a guide to top law firms that rates them on family-friendliness. As students, these women, who can certainly command some of the highest salaries in the American economy, are thinking ahead about finding workplaces that permit flexibility.

Another noteworthy point is that her entire experience is in the realm of big-scope organizations - McKinsey & Co., the US Treasury, Google, Facebook.  And she's a pure product of east-coast top-tier networking and go-getterism.   Not a great deal - as in none, from what I can tell - of experience with the small-business female entrepreneur in flyover country who has worked out unique ways to achieve the aforementioned balance.  In short, no discernible acknowledgement that real individual freedom means that one's life can't necessarily serve as a prototype for a repeatable model.

But Charen sees the essence of the main contradiction is the Sandberg worldview quite clearly:

[Sandberg says that]  "I think a world that was run where half our countries and half our companies were run by women would be a better world."

Maybe. But I haven't noticed that women heads of government or women heads of companies behave differently than men. She's treating her preference as an assumed good. This is one of those little vanities that is permitted to women but would be unacceptable coming from the mouth of a man. No man would dare to suggest, for example, that the field of nursing or teaching would be improved if men were more equally represented.

Isn't there something chauvinistic about Sandberg's assumption?

Of course, the counter-argument is that the institutions and organizations of the world - governments, businesses, educational entities, even churches and clubs - tend to be rather rigidly hierarchical  and tend to reward behavior patterns we might associate with masculinity - aggression, sizing up one's fellows, testing others to see what they're made of - and that this makes for a colder, less nurturing world than any of us desire.

But this brings us back full-circle to what I had to say about Sandberg's grasp of human history.  It was ever thus, toots.  Men tend to pick up the chalk when they walk into the room.  Any society organized in any way other than patriarchally has been such an exception as to be negligible.

And that's why we have to classify Sandberg, for all her economics background and business-world experience, as a leftist.  She is, as all leftists are, out to remake human nature, invent a new creature, re-order a world that was constructed according to the design of One who preceded  - as in eternally - any of us humans.