The West is homeless

Article here. Excerpt:

'In this sense there is a case to be made that the pre-modern woman, working in her home with her husband and family, had in some ways more agency and power than her contemporary counterpart whose life is directed from outside the home by distant commercial interests. Certainly the feminist movement, in at least some of its iterations, has been thoroughly hijacked by capitalism. The “liberation” of women has often translated into the separating of women from their self-sufficiency, as men were separated before them, and their embedding instead into the world of commerce, whether they want it or not.

My point is not that women should get back into the kitchen: it is that we all should. Modernity prised the men away from the home first, as the industrial revolution broke their cottage industries and swept them into the factories and mines, where their brute strength could be useful. Later the women, who had been mostly left to tend the home single-handedly, were subject to the same process. The needs of business were sold to both sexes as a project of “liberation” from home, family and place.

The reason this happened is clear enough. Making a home requires both men and women to sacrifice their own desires for that of the wider family — but this kind of sacrifice does not feed the monster. Only by unmooring the human being from his or her roots in community and place can the emancipated individual consumer and self-creator be born. Only by promoting the fulfilment of individual desire as the meaning of a human life, can the selflessness that we once prized as a cultural ideal be transmuted into the selfishness that capitalism needs to thrive. Liberation and profit, as ever, prove a seamless fit.'