The Work of Simone de Beauvoir Raises Some Interesting Questions

From today’s Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of the novelist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, (pictured here with her boyfriend Jean-Paul Sartre) born in Paris, France (1908)…..

Sartre wrote his book Being and Nothingness (1943) about (existentialism), and Beauvoir followed with a book of ethics based on the same ideas, called The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). But one of her most famous books was inspired by an offhand comment Sartre made one day. They were talking about the differences in the ways men and women were treated, and Beauvoir claimed that she’d never been adversely affected by this treatment. Sartre said, “All the same, you weren’t brought up the same way a boy would have been; you should look into it further.”

So Beauvoir did look into it. She spent weeks at the National Library in Paris researching the way women had been treated throughout history. The result was her book The Second Sex (1949), in which she wrote, “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” It was one of the first comprehensive arguments that the difference between the sexes was the result of culture, not nature, and it helped found the modern feminist movement.

This also causes one to wonder what other things in our basic character are the result of the culture in which were raised. It calls to mind many questions, like why do almost all Americans believe that:

• The primary goal of life is the accumulation of large amounts of wealth, in a world whose global population is so impoverished that 1.5 billion people can’t get a glass of clean water to drink.

• A permanent condition of war is acceptable and justifiable.

• Faith in a single anthropomorphic God is the only path to righteousness; i.e., all those who practice Baha’i, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Jainism, Shinto, Sikhism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism, not to mention garden-variety atheists, are leading blasphemous lives.

• It’s OK to consume massive amounts of cow and pig flesh.

• There is nothing fundamentally wrong with our business-as-usual approach to energy and the environment.

It’s hard to believe that human beings, with our innate sensitivity and rationality, are born with any of this preprogrammed into us.