It’s silly to talk about wanting equal value for all endeavors or cultures or lifestyles, although it’s a perfectly ordinary sentiment to express these days. We all say it, but no one really believes it; we really just want equal recognition for us.

I think children are the most instructive example for figuring out what we actually do want and do mean by saying that we want justice and equality. No child actually wants equal outcomes for everything and everyone, however much they may complain about wanting things to be fair. Fair, to a child, means “I get the same benefits as you.” Children have no interest in equal shares in punishment or poor outcomes. They also have little desire for others to share in any benefits that they specially earned, and only a mild interest in sharing designated benefits.

Almost no one really wants equal, equivalent, value placed on all activities. If all choices were that equal, it could only be because they were equally meaningless. We want complex, appropriate value to be assigned to all endeavors and lifestyles. We want them to be given their due. That’s justice. But we don’t want to have to argue about what those appropriate values should be or admit that the there is any discussion that needs to be had. We want to be able to assume our own prejudices and values so we don’t have to think about them. We want to be able to assume that everyone values what we value and ignores and views as unimportant what we ignore and see as unimportant, and that whatever we think is actually dumb or bad is dumb and bad. No one really believes that all their value judgements are purely arbitrary except the man who ruled the universe. Everyone else secretly thinks they’re right from day one.

So when we say “don’t judge” we don’t really mean “don’t judge,” we mean “don’t judge differently from me; don’t make me have to think about or defend my judgements”. We don’t believe that making value judgements is really bad, we think that anyone not agreeing with our value judgements is bad.

Equivalence isn’t justice, for the simple reason that diversity is actually real, meaning that there is more than one possible way of being and more than one possible outcome in life. Differences exist, choices exist, therefore you have to learn to recognize and navigate them. Brains are required. And that kicks back our problem to a far more complex issue than we don’t want to tackle, the question: “What then should be value?”

If your framework tells you that your own individual power, particularly your economic power, exceeds all other goals, then sure, maybe all other values and even all diversity of desires, capabilities, and ends, should be sacrificed to it. If you’re not getting all you can get now, for you, according to the prevailing metrics, you’re an idiot and a loser.

Or maybe that’s #$&@ing stupid and virtually every society is rife with wise people who have been trying to explain that and you’ve just been dumb to listen. Value isn’t simple. It doesn’t matter if you’re oversimplifying it into mere power and wealth because you’re a violent, predatory, unbalanced, hyper-masculinized society or because you’re a progressive, revisionist, equalitarian, deconstructivist society. It’s wrong and stupid, regardless.

Even the vikings knew the value of motherhood. Even the Egyptians and Greeks and a host of others made a mother the queen of the gods. They did not set the god of the blind pursuit of wealth or the mere exercise of arbitrary power at the head of the divine order. No truly great ancient culture was that dumb. And those who did set the mere exercise of power over others as their supreme value generally died by the sword they lived by. Their rule was unstable, like most tyrannical rulerships are, even in the animal kingdom.

Motherhood shouldn’t be valued equally with every possible option. But it should be as valued as motherhood is valuable. It should be exactly as great a god as it actually is. So how great is it? It co-rules the universe with fatherhood as one half of the supreme value dyad. Everything depends on it. So yeah, it’s pretty valuable. And any society that can’t see that is more foolish than virtually any society that has ever existed.

Does valuing motherhood mean mothers should earn more money than CEOs? Probably not, since the goal of motherhood isn’t to produce money, and activities are rewarded in terms of what they seek to produce. And since a good 49% of the human race is capable of being a mother, that would present some economic challenges.

Motherhood produces value, for sure, but not usually through some mediated stand-in like money. It produces a whole host of goods and types of value, many of them very direct and tangible that don’t require mediation by money, and whose value may not even be easily reducible to such terms.

The problem with us is that our value horizons are so short and so simplistic that we don’t even know what value motherhood possesses or produces. So we don’t know how to value it. We’re even afraid to value it. And we should be. The goddess of the hearth is far more powerful and ancient than the gods of wealth and political power. She doesn’t hold a sword or a fistful of coins, but she wields an almost inestimable amount of power. Keeping her asleep and unknown is the only way to suppress her power.

Knowing our foolishness, of course the only worse mistake we could make other than stripping the supreme goddess of her divinity would be to divide her from her partner and lover, the divine father. By isolating her and leaving her alone, we cripple her and make her part even harder and more thankless and less stable, while claiming to honor and elevate her. We leave her without her counterpart, her counterbalance, and without half of the support she had, nor half of the work she had to do.

If we weren’t going to ruin motherhood by stopping it of its due honor and value, we could ruin it by stripping it of half of humanity, the masculine half of parenthood. That’s a crime against fathers, a crime against mothers, and a crime against humanity, just as the denigration of the divine mother is an insult to the divine father and all their children.

I don’t mean to over-mythologize. Mythology is just a very convenient way to encapsulate value hierarchies that might otherwise remain tacit and inarticulated. They’re there, in the back of our minds. But the symbols of value, the worship, the honor, the disrespect, the empty altars, those can be hard to see when they aren’t made so tangible and iconographic.

Motherhood obviously still has many devotees. The cult of the father, however, has been largely wiped out by cultural fiat and by a lack of prophets. And people are currently chiseling the name of the mother off her statues and representations. Maybe there is some instinct that drives some people to feel that if they can’t have fatherhood (for whatever reason, they are incapable) that they will take motherhood. It’s at least worth wondering if that is part of our motivation, since we so often don’t really know what it is that we’re really doing.

There is a sense, I think, in which only the mother can save the father, and only the father can save the mother. You can’t just assign yourself value. Someone has to recognize and validate it. And there is also a sense in which you are less likely to go wrong defending the value of someone who is in opposition to you than you are defending your own. My wife can defend me better to my own children than I can. And I can do the same for her. We need an advocate.

I’m not ashamed to say that men need women like this woman to help them and advocate for them, to love them and defend them and challenge them. We don’t have the kind of power women have (and I do mean kind, not amount). Amount assumes an apples to apples comparison, but one reason we can’t sacrifice everything for traditionally male power structures is that that’s not the only kind of power there is. And there may be others that are just as essential to human flourishing and our overall essential power as a species.

You don’t just lose a lesser portion of the same sort of power when you lose the power of the mother, you lose an entirely unique and essential and opposing or complimentary type of power. You don’t lose some degree of what it means to be human, like losing some portion of height in exchange for more height; you lose part of what it means to be human, like losing your legs in exchange for more arms. And the relevant question is, how much can you afford to lose your legs and be all arms, really? You’re not an octopus.