Against "Force Doctrine"

Responding to Andrew Wilson

Achilles vents his rage on Hector, printed by Domenico Cunego after a painting by Gavin Hamilton. Public domain.

In recent months, a line of argument against “feminism,” variously defined, has been advanced by a crew of online Debate Bros who orbit around the semi-popular internet persona Andrew Wilson, host of “The Crucible” debate show, formerly known as “Big Papa Fascist,” hawker of an expensive online debate course, a man who has cowered from multiple boxing challenges he himself put forward, and so on. Andrew claims to be an Eastern Orthodox Christian and is a self-avowed patriarchal Christian Nationalist. I will let him tell you what he thinks all of those words mean (and I will let your local Orthodox priest tell you what they think of his behavior) but suffice it to say that many people across the political and religious spectrum have found reason to object to his beliefs, arguments, and conduct.

My point here is not to defend “feminism,” nor is it to present a comprehensive critique of Wilson (maybe I’ll do that another day). My object is specifically to deal in short form with this “force doctrine” as he has presented it and to highlight where I, as a self-described Christian conservative, find it frustrating in form and content.

Before I begin, I think it’s important to note that Wilson has presented his “force doctrine” as an internal critique of feminism. That is, he thinks the argument attacks the internal logic of feminism in the sense that it cannot reconcile its claimed equality of the sexes with simple facts of reality, namely how that equality is established or enforced. Thus, he is able deftly to avoid some criticisms by saying that the argument is not his own normative position, only a critique of the position of his opponents. This defensive move is somewhat weakened by the fact that Wilson’s own political positions seem to follow the logic of his “force doctrine,” such as his belief that women shouldn’t vote, a conclusion one might arrive at by following the logic of the argument he presents. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So as not to mislead you on Wilson’s claims, I’m going to quote directly from a moderated debate on the topic of feminism he had on the obscene “Whatever” podcast (a vile show which I do not recommend you watch in general, but which happens to have hosted some high-quality debates of late outside of its normal lascivious format). If you are a bit masochistic, you can watch the whole debate here, but I will quote from the section where he defines his terms:

Force doctrine is a doctrine which I came up with which tries to describe a phenomenon which you yourself are going to have to concede is true: that half of the world right now, if men decide to, they can basically exterminate every single woman inside of their nations and there's not a damn thing women can do about it. we can find this in most of the Middle Eastern nations, we can find this basically anywhere that we look, right, they [women] can't actually do anything about it. Also when it comes to rights: rights are a social construction, a product of the mind. Because of that, they are not inherent, and since this is the case, force is what is the practical applicator. And if men decided to, by force, take away women's rights, women cannot do anything about it. The opposite is not true: if women wanted to take away men's rights and men didn't want to let them, they could not. And because of this force doctrine application, women's rights all come from men not inherently from themselves. Therefore, feminism is a lie, a complete lie. That's force doctrine.

There are lots of claims here, so I want to make them clear and specific. The first, central claim of Wilson’s force doctrine is that half of the world (that is, men) could, if they chose, exterminate the other half of the world (that is, women). In other words, “men” as a class could band together and, based on average physical strength, subdue and even massacre “women” as a class. On a political level, this operationalizes like some nations, like “most of the Middle Eastern nations” reducing women to what Wilson thinks of as a state of servitude, with other nations, like the United States and other western democracies, graciously deigning to grant their women some rights. How kind of them!

If, however, the US or any other western nation were to, tomorrow, decide to strip women of their rights or their lives, there is, and I quote, “not a damn thing women can do about it.” I’m not repeating this to stoke mere outrage, but I do think it is important to know that at this point in the debate, Wilson appears to be reading from a prepared statement. His words are carefully considered. Whether over rebutting his debate opponent or over the concept itself, Wilson seems almost gleeful in his recitation of the litany of ways men could subjugate women if they so choose.

Because rights only matter or exist meaningfully on this account when they are enforced, and because only men are, at the extremes, able to enforce rights, Wilson concludes that “women’s rights all come from men, not inherently from themselves,” and that “therefore feminism is a lie.”

Given my own nerdy area of expertise, Wilson’s arguments have always set off alarm bells in my head as being fundamentally Thrasymachian. That is, they have the character of Thrasymachus’s objection to Socrates in the Republic: That which we CALL “justice” is merely the interest of the stronger; the stronger can enforce his will and thus those who cannot enforce theirs will conform.

In Andrew’s case, the argument bears a nifty twist: that which we typically call “justice” is merely the interest of the weaker, enforced by the benevolence of the stronger. Or, perhaps the stronger are unwittingly deceived into buying into the ideas of justice advanced by the weaker (women), in which case Wilson’s argument takes on a decidedly Nietzschean flavor. In either case, Wilson argues that “rights” are made up, “equality” is a cruel joke, and that women need to realize that all that they have in this world that is not abject cruelty and violence comes from the beneficence of men, who could do anything they wished to women if they were only slightly more unrestrained. In short, “force doctrine” in the sense Wilson uses it is the “doctrine” that “force” is the only thing that makes something real, and so “rights” are only real insofar as men enforce them.

Allow me to clarify by comparison: There is a famous report in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson where Johnson responds to George Berkeley-style idealism by crying "I refute it thus!" and kicking a stone. Andrew Wilson, similarly, responds to feminism "I refute it thus!" and implicitly threatening to kick a woman.

Wilson is careful: much of his “force doctrine,” he says, is “descriptive,” not normative. “I’m not giving an ‘ought,’” he clarifies to his interlocutor in the debate I quoted from above. Instead, he is simply telling us a hard truth feminists are unwilling to stomach: that, apparently, might makes right[s] whether we like it or not, and so where rights for the weaker sex exist, they have their origin in and from men, not in something about women that is deserving of rights (their status as human beings, for example, or their status as image bearers of God…). Wilson himself might believe that women have some sort of dignity because of these things, but his feminist opponents do not have justifiable access to similar grounds for these beliefs, or so he argues.

But insofar as Wilson attempts to make his argument purely descriptive and practical, I think it fails on its own terms. In his famed Democracy in America, in a section on the salutary effect serving on a jury has on the citizens of a democracy and its system of laws, Alexis de Tocqueville notes: “Force is never anything but a transient element in success: immediately after it comes the idea of right. A government reduced to being able to reach its enemies only on the battlefield would soon be destroyed.”

In other words, strength of arms only counts for so much. Where a government would like to enforce its will by sheer firepower or physical strength, it will often find itself lacking. A government seeking its own stability must “reach its enemies” in places other than the battlefield, such as in the pseudo-mythical marketplace of ideas. Think of how important ideological warfare was and has been in the first Cold War and our current tense international situation, as global powers jockey for influence. Or think of the fraught political argument over western support for Ukraine against Russia: Guns and bombs are only part of the equation. If a government could only fight with strength and not with ideas, it would “soon be destroyed.”

The other important part of this equation is “the idea of right,” something equally powerful and motivating as force of arms. It has apparently been so motivating that it has kept those capable of exercising “force” on the side of women for something like a century, at least in the US. Why this might be the case and how women accomplished this grand trickery is not foremost in Wilson’s discussion of force doctrine, and the possibility that women could have persuaded men on the grounds of good ideas and good morals to defend them against those who would otherwise exterminate them is categorically outside the discussion. “Ideas,” to borrow a 15-year-old anarchist’s favorite quote, “are bulletproof,” and Wilson risks sounding like a Marxist materialist when he articulates a “force doctrine” that seems to leave no room for ethical systems directing where that force is applied. The fact that things could be other than they are is a trivial observation; the fact that force is, has been, and perhaps ought to be applied differently than his women-massacring hypothetical world, seems lost in the discussion.

Think by analogy to our not-so-distant past: That majority “races” hold the physical, martial, and economic power to keep members of minority “races” enslaved tells us nothing of value about the appropriate legal codes that should govern our society, and those in the minority have historically made great use of claims to transcendent morality and things like rights, “dignity,” and the imago dei to secure legal protection for rights they argued pre-existed their legal recognition. Wilson’s “force doctrine” would tell me precisely zero about which side I should take in historic conflicts around the slave trade or the institution of slavery, and in fact might predispose me, if I were uncritically to accept it, to side with those with all of the power to enforce their will. After all, if they can’t physically stop me from taking them and shipping them across the world into legal bondage, their rights must be fake, made up, constructs of the mind, right?

Permit me a brief anecdote: in discussing this essay, a friend of mine ( who is incidentally also an Eastern Orthodox Christian like Wilson, but one who is actually willing to tell me his bishop’s name) pointed me to this conversation from THE MATRIX RELOADED. In this scene, Neo and the Councilor are talking about the relationship of the out-of-matrix humans to machines, and whether the machines they use to live outside the matrix "control" them in some way. When Neo is pressed to explain the difference between the machines they use and the machines that previously kept them enslaved in the matrix, the conversation goes as follows:

“If we wanted, we could shut these machines down.”

“Of course! That’s it, you hit it, that’s control isn’t it. If we wanted, we could smash them to bits. Although if we did, we would have to consider what would happen to our lights, our heat, our air…”

I found this exchange surprisingly apt to the discussion at hand. The basic claim of “force doctrine” is “we [men] could kill all women if we wanted." To which the response should be "oh man, you might be right! But... why? And... then what? And... so what?" Maybe all Wilson means to say is that feminism and other “secular” moral systems do not have a sufficiently persuasive way to account for these pre-existent things, but his use of the argument, and the use to which the argument has been put by his fans, suggests that the implications run a bit deeper than mere internal critique of feminism.

Let me conclude by returning to my earlier point, that Wilson’s argument takes on a kind of Nietzschean flavor in its insinuation that women’s rights were achieved off the backs of physically strong men deceived about what is in their best interests to direct their physical strength to protecting women. I wonder, truly, what Andrew thinks about the similar argument as Nietzsche presents it: is not the history of morality, on Nietzsche’s account, another example of “force doctrine”? Is it not true that the morality of the Christianity that Andrew professes is a morality of the poor, downtrodden, oppressed, meek, and lowly? Is it not historically true that a persecuted people group preached a faith in a God who commanded them to care for the widow and the orphan and the stranger and alien in their land, and that this faith in turn turned to Jesus Christ, the Messiah, who preached the Sermon on the Mount? Is not Christianity, at every turn, rejecting the wisdom (and the strength) of this world, and is Christ not a stumbling block to those who preach the muscular paganism that warred first against Judaism and then against Christianity?

That is not to say that Christianity does not have room for masculine virtues, far from it. It is instead to say that the virtues of Christianity seem to be ones that teach precisely the regard for those who are weaker in body and political power, those whom Wilson’s force doctrine and those who employ it seem to demean. Yes, it’s true, physical violence can be used to do a great many awful things. And it may be true that many feminists are unable, under the force of Wilson’s rhetorical capoeira, to justify their belief in the equal dignity of the sexes. But as a “doctrine,” Wilson’s “force doctrine” seems confused at best and a dangerous tool at worst.