The main justification for the existence of the women’s movement these days is to support and expand the cult of victimhood

WHAT LEFTIST FEMINISM HAS WROUGHT from Dr. Sanity by Dr. Sanity

Siggy writes about the 'culture wars' over gender:

One of the great ‘culture wars’ of the last century has been fought over gender identity. Differences in human biology were minimized or eradicated entirely. There is entire generation that has been taught that what is good for men is good for women and what is good for women is good for men. As a result, the reality that men and women have different needs is ignored. What separates men and women, according to the cultural dogma 0f this western new world order, is gender as defined by sexual organs only.

There are of course, other truths....In defining humankind with a one size fits all parameter, popular culture has unfairly put an onerous burden on women. We understand the qualities that define adulthood and maturity are many, not the least of which are independent and autonomous thinking, logical thinking and responsible actions and behaviors. These are masculine traits. They are measured and played out on a level playing field. Women have become trapped by current culture.

Not only have women become trapped by the new rules, jublantly ushered in by the feminists, but men have also been 'liberated' from their traditional roles:

Many men simply don’t feel the need to grow up because women have quite plainly said they don’t need or value men. “You say you can take care of yourselves? Fantastic! I’m gonna go invent computer games and play them for as long as I want.” So, women indulged in a gigantic fit of self-indulgence and selfishness, which they are still very much involved in, and along comes not just one woman (you), but many of them, calling upon men to engage in the self-sacrifice of yesteryear, while at the same time, retaining all of their newfound privilege, comfort, self-determination, and yes, power, both over themselves (fair) and men (not quite so fair). Don’t like your husband? Divorce him and don’t worry about it. The law will ensure that he still does his 18th century duties; and you’ll still get the kids. Not quite feeling fulfilled enough? Drop your kids at day care without a thought to their welfare and go get it.

I do not mean to suggest that nothing was gained by the feminist movement of the last century. I attribute some of the opportunities I have had in my life to the courageous women who dared to challenge the system in the last century.In the beginning of that century, feminist intellectuals argued that women need NOT be victims or second-class citizens; that they were free to choose and live up to the best within themselves. In a free country, women should have the same opportunities as men and be judged not on their gender, but on their merit and capabilities.And then the bankrupt marxist/leftist ideology infected the women's movement.

The good news is that the early women’s movement was instrumental in mobilizing and encouraging women (such as myself) to reach for the stars. One small measure of the success of that movement is that most medical school classes today are >50% or more composed of women! There is no systematic discrimination any more that keeps women out of medicine. Women are in every medical specialty. They have become presidents of universities and professional societies; deans of medical schools and chairwomen of departments. This is really wonderful. And these gains have been made in almost every profession and area of human endeavor.

The bad news is that the leftist feminists could not accept that the mission had been mostly accomplished because they were too invested in the same old marxist "oppressor/oppressed" template that has obsessed the political left throughout the 20th century. The strategy then shifted from encouraging women to reach for the stars, to injustice collecting; denigrating men; and most importantly maintaining women's special and priveliged victimhood status.

Today women who want to become professionals--or do anything for that matter--can do it--including becoming wives and mothers if they choose. They have achieved equality of opportunity and little stands in their way except their own choices. The war has long been won and women have all the opportunity anyone could desire; but for some reason, the diehard leftist feminists continue to battle on, quivering with outrage that there is still no equality of outcome . They seem to be enraged at the fact that men are really different from women and that, when it comes to biology and physiology, there is no equality of outcome. There is only reality.

The main justification for the existence of the women’s movement these days is to support and expand the cult of victimhood that has been created for women. The justification for bashing men and undermining traditional roles is to maintain the cult and promote their socialist agenda which long ago replaced any agenda driven by the concerns of ordinary women..

Is it any wonder that both women and men have been shortchanged (gang-raped, might be a good term to describe it) by the angry, screeching feminists of today's women's movement, who now answer to their marxist masters and are determined to usher in the Caliphate of the X Chromosome. Submit to leftist feminization or they will will feel horribly, terribly bad. They might even swoon. But even worse than that, they will get pissy and make your life quite miserable.

Men are the emotional ones more likely to get swept away in abstract ideas and symbolism, and women are simply more practical

16 Ways of Looking at a Female Voter By LINDA HIRSHMAN NYT: February 3, 2008

1. The Female Thing

what women needed wasn’t change; it was the whole truth and nothing but the truth: “Women are too smart, informed and astute at reading between the lines to back a presidential candidate who isn’t being straight with them — especially when she is a woman.” ...

“that we’re all voting for Obama because we want to date him, but they were showing a picture of Obama at the time, and I heard birds singing and bells ringing and missed it.” ...
“Do women Obama’s age look at him and see the popular boy who never talked to them in high school? ...

2. Mind the Gender Gap
men supported Reagan by 8 percentage points more than women did. Of course, more women supported the incumbent, President Jimmy Carter, than did men. And ever since, women have been more likely than men to favor Democrats. Both parties have tried a variety of strategies to open or close the gender gap: nominating a woman for vice president (Geraldine Ferraro), pretending there was no difference, collecting women into smaller subgroups (soccer moms, security moms), emphasizing feminist issues (equal opportunity, reproductive rights), emphasizing economics (health, welfare, child care)...

3. Race Matters—and Class, Too
RACE FACTORS into the gender gap in two important ways...

women as a group were less “white” than men were — and nonwhite women are more likely to vote Democratic than white women are. Second, nonwhite women are more likely to vote Democratic than nonwhite men (75 percent to 67 percent in 2004)...

5. Besides, Women Keep an Open Mind
the female moderates, it turned out, were actually more Democratic than Republican, but like most women, they voted only somewhat more for John Kerry than for George Bush in the 2004 presidential election. “They don’t see the political world as legible, especially in the media,” Blakley suggested. “That’s why they misidentify themselves, these words don’t make sense to them, they don’t have a value and a weight that makes sense to them, a narrative for politics.”

6. What About the Middle Ground?
WHEN IT comes to politics, it’s not just that women are ambivalent; it’s that, as a group, they are less interested than men are — not all women, naturally, but on average...

The only area where the gap narrows is in local politics, where women score close to men. Not surprisingly, less interest translates into less knowledge.

7. The Gap That Matters
THE PEW Research Center for the People and the Press has been following the gender divide in news consumption in great detail for years. This is what that gap looks like:

POLITICAL INTERESTS - MEN - WOMEN
International affairs- 63% - 37%
News about Washington- 59 - 41
Local government- 55 - 45

While men are more likely to follow international, national and local politics, women are more likely to attend to religion, health and entertainment, community, culture and the arts, crime and the weather. Men are significantly more likely than women to be regular consumers of “hard news” (32 percent of men versus 22 percent of women), and to turn to the Internet, radio news, talk radio, newspapers, political comedy shows and political talk shows. Women, by contrast, are more likely to get their news from the morning news broadcasts and network news programs. Although morning shows do offer news, they tend toward true crime, entertainment and lifestyle, and they regularly put a human-interest spin on government and foreign affairs.
Even if you factor in all the ways in which people gather news — women supposedly also get political information from the groups they join and from the people they know — and control for political affiliations, race and class, men still know more about politics than women do...

Of course, a quick glance at the numbers confirms that a lot of people, of both sexes, are hardly following the news at all. Most voters aren’t policy wonks. It may well be that there’s a base line of information that is “good enough” for citizenship, and knowing more makes little practical difference. But there is a strong correlation between knowledge and political participation. In most aspects of political action — candidacy, fund-raising, proselytizing, propagandizing — men predominate.

8. What Makes Women Tune Out
only one-third of news accounts cited any female sources at all.

9. Pride and Prejudice
NOT ONLY do fewer women turn to outlets with predominantly male sources for information, but studies also tie women to what scholars call the negative-media effect. Women will sometimes back a candidate because the media they distrust are backing his or her rival...

10. XX Marks the Spot
HISTORICALLY, THERE is no reason to believe that women, even Democratic women, will automatically support a female candidate... women, like men, have multiple commitments and connections, which pull their electoral loyalties in many directions. And because women’s lives are intimately connected with those of men, women are a little harder to organize...Seeing themselves as part of the political arena encourages women to get involved...

12. More Sense Than Sensibility

voters are more driven by their emotions than by any informed summing-up of their interests...As Popkin has noted, a party is really just shorthand for a series of issue positions — you love your party because it stands for what you stand for. So, if women as a group know less, does that mean they are more or less emotional when it comes to voting? ...

it’s that men are the emotional ones, “more likely to get swept away in abstract ideas and symbolism, ” and that women are simply more practical. “They may not frame their decisions in terms of policy or party positions — not use legislative jargon — but they know what’s in their family’s interest,” she said...
She characterizes the female agenda as focusing mainly on “family, education, things that affect the household budget, health care.” Which today, she adds, also means war and peace. Similarly, Page Gardner told me that for her single-women constituents, it’s “all about economic opportunity — health, education for their children, wages, energy costs.” ...

13. It Does Take a Village

“Women naturally think of working with other women in network form, talking to each other about what’s important.” ... The campaign has also focused on the issues they thought would attract women’s support, starting with events around Equal Pay Day last spring. “The polling confirms what common sense will tell you,” Lewis said. “Economics, health care, education, their own retirement.”

14. Or a Cybervillage

THE OBAMA campaign has also identified a woman-to-woman strategy...Certainly Obama’s oratorical skill is a vivid reminder of the role of rhetoric to inspire political commitment, and he has done extremely well with young women voters, those most likely to be wired...

15. The Political Is Personal

No less a figure than Carol Gilligan, the feminist scholar who first posited that women express themselves in a different voice, reminded me that she never said a woman’s tendency to value relational connections excluded the self. “Coming forward with their own voices is key to citizenship in a democratic republic,” Gilligan told me. “Women are using their emotional intelligence and relational intelligence to read the biographies to figure out if this is a trustworthy person.”
And when women do come forward, they alter the political landscape. Scott Keeter, of the Pew organization, and Michael Delli Carpini, of the University of Pennsylvania, found that as knowledge increases, “both single and married men become slightly more conservative, while married women move slightly in the liberal direction and single women become quite a bit more liberal.” These changes lead to a clear gender and marriage gap on domestic-welfare issues. As Keeter and Carpini concluded in their study: “A fully informed citizenry would have collective consequences, resulting in a public-opinion environment that is more ideologically diverse and slightly more liberal.”...

16. By the Numbers
SINCE 1964, more women have voted than men have, and since 1980, they have voted at higher percentages: 54 percent of voters in the 2004 presidential election were female. If women care less about politics than men do, why do they bother? In one recent study, women said that they vote to protect their interest. Whereas men said they vote because they enjoy politics. To a campaign strategist, the female vote — if you can get it — must look like the Chinese market does to an entrepreneur. Only a modest percentage has to want your product, and you’ll succeed beyond your wildest dreams.
Linda Hirshman is the author of “Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World.” This is her first article for the magazine.

We must be equally concerned to help couples who don’t marry become better co-parents

The Future of Marriage by Stephanie Coontz Lead Essay January 14th, 2008 About Cato Unbound

With half of all Americans aged 25-29 unmarried, marriage no longer organizes the transition into regular sexual activity or long-term partnerships the way it used to. Although teen births are lower than a decade ago, births to unwed mothers aged 25 and older continue to climb. Almost 40 percent of America’s children are born to unmarried parents. And gay and lesbian families are permanently out of the closet.

Massive social changes combine to ensure that a substantial percentage of people will continue to explore alternatives to marriage. These include women’s economic independence, the abolition of legal penalties for illegitimacy, the expansion of consumer products that make single life easier for both men and women, and the steady decline in the state’s coercive power over personal life. Add to this mix the continuing rise in the age of marriage, a trend that increases the stability of marriages once they are contracted but also increases the percentage of unwed adults in the population. Stir in the reproductive revolution, which has made it possible for couples who would once have been condemned to childlessness to have the kids they want, but impossible to prevent single women or gay and lesbian couples from having children. Top it off with changes in gender roles that have increased the payoffs of marriage for educated, financially-secure women but increased its risks for low-income women whose potential partners are less likely to hold egalitarian values, earn good wages, or even count on a regular job. Taken together, this is a recipe for a world where the social weight of marriage has been fundamentally and irreversibly reduced.

The decline in marriage’s dominating role in organizing social and personal life is not unique to America. It is occurring across the industrial world, even in countries with less “permissive” values and laws. In predominantly Catholic Ireland, where polls in the 1980s found near-universal disapproval of premarital sex, one child in three today is born outside marriage. China’s divorce rate has soared more than 700 percent since 1980. Until 2005, Chile was the only country in the Western Hemisphere that still prohibited divorce. But in today’s world, prohibiting divorce has very different consequences than in the past, because people no longer feel compelled to marry in the first place. Between 1990 and 2003, the number of marriages in Chile fell from 100,000 to 60,000 a year, and nearly half of all children born in Chile in the early years of the 21st century were born to unmarried couples...

When a wife takes a job today, it works to stabilize the marriage. Couples who share housework and productive work have more stable marriages than couples who do not, according to sociologist Lynn Prince Cooke. And the Amato study found that husbands and wives who hold egalitarian views about gender have higher marital quality and fewer marital problems than couples who cling to more traditional views. So there is no reason to give up on building successful marriages — but we won’t do it by giving people outdated advice about gender roles...

The second lesson of history is that the time has passed when we can construct our social policies, work schedules, health insurance systems, sex education programs — or even our moral and ethical beliefs about who owes what to whom — on the assumption that all long-term commitments and care-giving obligations should or can be organized through marriage. Of course we must seek ways to make marriage more possible for couples and to strengthen the marriages they contract. But we must be equally concerned to help couples who don’t marry become better co-parents, to help single parents and cohabiting couples meet their obligations, and to teach divorced parents how to minimize their conflicts and improve their parenting.

The right research and policy question today is not “what kind of family do we wish people lived in?” Instead, we must ask “what do we know about how to help every family build on its strengths, minimize its weaknesses, and raise children more successfully?” Much recent hysteria to the contrary, we know a lot about how to do that. We should devote more of our energies to getting that research out and less to fantasizing about a return to a mythical Golden Age of marriage of the past.

—
Stephanie Coontz teaches history at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and is Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families (www.contemporaryfamilies.org). Her most recent book is Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage. This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 8:58 am and is filed under Lead Essay.

Taylor’s politics authorizes speculative history

A case of heteronomous thinking from The Immanent Frame by Stathis Gourgouris

As a story, A Secular Age rivals Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (which curiously it ignores) and does indeed belong to the largely neglected genre of speculative history. No doubt, it is a work of a lifetime’s worth of erudition – about this there can be no argument – but the easiest thing one can do is to praise it. The best and most profound of what it has to offer is precisely that the domains of thought and history it privileges be interrogated in order to stand as departure points for further thinking. This interrogation and evaluation cannot stay simply at the level of the story, but must extend to what authorizes the story, Charles Taylor’s (conscious or unconscious, explicit or implicit) politics. [...]

Why certain sections of the domestic sphere, such as the kitchen and bath, resisted change

Amita Sinha

One of the few books written on the urban history of South Asia, Indigenous Modernities is ambitious in its effort to demonstrate that the momentous changes in the social and physical environment of Delhi, taking place between 1857 and 1947, exemplified "indigenous modernities." Reviews Home

Hosagrahar sets out to read this cultural landscape in the window of time that ushered in modernity. In five chapters she traces the fragmentation of the domestic spaces of havelis (mansions); the withdrawal of the community from the public realm; the breakdown of traditional health and sanitary systems; privatization; and the commodification of community property. Modernization extracted a terrible price, combining as it did urban reform with profit-seeking motives. The stresses generated by these imposed social changes were enormous and had the potential to destroy the social fabric. That, however, did not happen. The colonized inhabitants proved resilient and appropriated modernity in ways they saw fit, ensuring their survival and furthering their lot in life. Delhi survived the departure of feudalism, the birth of nationalism, and the attainment of independence, all in less than a century. Hosagrahar's study illuminates the price the city paid and its ill-gotten gains in private and public spheres.

In the aftermath of the Mutiny/First War of Independence (1857), havelis, residences of landowning gentry, suffered from neglect and were converted into warehouses and smaller residential units. These large houses had been the mainstay of neighborhoods, because the occupants supported artisans and their trades. At the same time, the rising entrepreneurial classes sought to live in hybrid versions of courtyard housing and European-style bungalows. Although the courtyards shrank and extended families fragmented, older lifestyles did not disappear entirely.

Attempts to produce public spaces as a public good were contested vehemently, accustomed as the residents were to using available land for their own purposes. Enforcement of bylaws and other regulations met with considerable resistance since matters concerning property rights and territorial encroachments had previously been resolved within the community or arbitrated by the elders. New urban spaces generated by the building of institutions such as the town hall became the venues for nationalist demonstrations, so a kind of civic realm, independent of religious or royal associations, did emerge, even though it had a conflict-ridden genesis. New medical systems of knowledge and the practice of their technologies produced spaces and built forms--hospitals and dispensaries--that did not entirely displace the shops of hakims and vaids, practitioners of unani and ayurvedic systems of traditional medicine. Similarly municipal services including piped-water supply, sewage systems, and trash collection did not result in the banishment of sweepers.

Hosagrahar draws upon municipal archives and her own interviews with Delhi residents to write an urban narrative that is handsomely illustrated with historic maps and photographs. The earlier chapters on havelis, streets, and geographies of health make for more interesting reading than the last two chapters on land development and new housing projects meant to create a "modern" citizen. I would have liked to know more about the influence of changing housing typology on gender roles, children's socialization, family structure, and social networks or why certain sections of the domestic sphere, such as the kitchen and bath, resisted change more than others and were transplanted into the bungalow.[1] One also wishes that other types of public spaces, not just the street and square, were discussed. For example, what was the role of greenery in ameliorating the effects of urban congestion?

Jyot Hosagrahar. Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism. New York: Routledge, 2005. xiii + 234 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $43.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-415-32376-5.
Reviewed by: Amita Sinha, Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Published by: H-Urban (February, 2007) ... Copyright © 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes

Consider the "great" Rousseau, who had five children with his companion, but abandoned them all without a moment of remorse

All in the Family: Interior Development and the Micro-Evolution of Man from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob

One book that influenced me along the way was Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, which is packed with fascinating details about what life was like for pre-modern Europeans. In contrast, A Secular Age is so dense and wordy that I'm having a little difficulty getting through it. Reminds me too much of school -- one of those books I should read, but don't really want to. Oh, the things I do for my readers.....

Surprisingly, Stone's book has only one amazon review, but it's pretty spot-on:

"It is an excellent source of information for genealogists trying to understand the motivation of ancestors whose actions seem incomprehensible today. By providing detailed analysis of family relationships from 1500 to 1800 in England, Mr. Stone has given us all an insight into thought processes and values that are very different from our own. The book would be equally valuable for anyone trying to understand the everyday lives of people in another time, to historians, to authors doing research for historical novels or plays, or simply to anyone who wants to take the equivalent of a ride in a time machine."

Having said that, I think I read somewhere that Stone was a Man of the Left, so I have no idea if he had some other agenda in writing the book (e.g., "deconstructing the family" or "queering the patriarchy"), but it seems hard to fault his data. It certainly rang true to me, because the one thing I always wanted to know about history is, "why were people so freaking crazy?" One of the things that made history so boring to me as a young kit is that it was just a chronicle of insane behavior, with no explanation for why people were so nutty. Not until I began studying psychohistory did things begin to add up. Now I wonder why history isn't even crazier than it is. As Woody Allen said about the Holocaust, the only question is why it doesn't happen more often. At the same time, the psychohistorical perspective has added to my gratitude for being so fortunate to live in the United States at this particular time. Judged by the standards of historical precedent, every day is a miracle. In any event, Stone begins by pointing out the four key features of the modern family -- again, things that we probably just take for granted, but which, from the point of view of developmental psychology, could hardly be of more earth-shattering consequence. If we fail to understand how different we are from our furbears, we will just project the present onto the past, and thereby not really understand it at all. The four features are

1) "intensified affective bonding of the nuclear core at the expense of neighbors and kin";

2) "a strong sense of individual autonomy and the right to personal freedom in the pursuit of happiness";

3) "a weakening of the association of sexual pleasure with sin and guilt"; and

4) "a growing desire for physical privacy."

All of these trends were well established by the mid-18th century in the English middle and upper classes.

However, it's not as if it were a linear process of evolution. Rather, Stone describes it as more analogous to an archaeological dig, in which different layers and strata are copresent, revealing very different "psychoclasses" (deMause's term), so to speak, living side by side. This is no different than today. For example, in my work conducting psychological evaluations of a culturally diverse population, I see the vast "vertical" differences between different cultural practices and beliefs, especially with regard to childrearing. For the left, these differences are purely "horizontal," which is why, for example, feminist groups have been so conspicuously silent about the greatest global threat to the well-being of women, Islam.As Stone writes, "older family types survive unaltered in some social groups at the same time other groups are evolving new patterns." One of my beefs with the Democrat party is that they make transparent appeals to more primitive mentalities and psychoclasses, which probably constitute the majority of their constituency. The appeal of a John Edwards is strictly limited to the very stupid and very angry. Oddly, the left is a combination of the over-educated (or uselessly educated), the fortuitously wealthy (i.e., Hollywood, the MSM), and the psychoculturally primitive, the latter of whom are ceaselessly manipulated by the former because it makes them feel good about themselves, even while guaranteeing that their largely self-generated problems will continue -- which may be the whole point, as the contemptuous leftist requires people to whom he can feel morally and intellectually superior under the guise of "rescuing." Look at the flack Obama is getting from the Clintons for being an ungrateful negro. Doesn't he realize that without LBJ, that goddamned nigger preacher (as President Johnson called King) wouldn't have accomplished a thing?

Let's not get sidetracked. With regard to marriage, it doesn't surprise me at all to learn that what we take for granted as modern companionate love, just didn't exist in the pre-modern world. Rather, through the middle ages, marriage was basically "a private contract between two families concerning property exchange, which also provided some financial protection to the bride in case of the death [or desertion] of her husband." I can't help thinking that most people literally couldn't fall in love, for a whole host of developmental reasons, not the least of which being that the foundation and possibility of love is laid down in the first two years of life, during the critical period of bonding and attachment to our parents. If you consider the incredibly callous way in which children were treated (which we'll get into below, both today and in subsequent posts), it is not surprising that earthly love was not on their psychological radar.

This is not to say that pre-modern marriages were entirely loveless. Again, remember the idea of the psychohistorical "strata." It's just that by the 17th century, as described by Spierenburg, there emerges an unprecedented "romantic ideal," along with the greater choice of a partner. At the same time, the "emotional distance" between family members begins to shrink. Before 1700, wives and children typically open letters with"My Lord Husband" or "My Lord Father," and use very formal and stiff language. From the age of 7 or 8 -- or whenever they were capable of doing so -- children were simply put to work. They were mainly regarded as an economic resource, not a cherished object of emotional intimacy. There was a much higher rate of accidental deaths of children, partly because parents just paid so little attention. I look at my son, who is admittedly on the "spirited" side of the continuum, but he would have been dead in five minutes without a body on him at all times, something that would have been quite difficult in the pre-modern world, when everyone was working from sunup to sundown. One reason we are so much more empathic toward our children is that most of us remember what it was like to be young -- we remember the ecstasies, the frustrations, the fears, the rages. But we know that people who were traumatized during childhood generally don't remember it all that clearly or accurately. In fact, the more they were traumatized, the more they tend to act out the trauma as adults, often toward their own children, as a pathological form of "recollection." I always find it fascinating to interview such a person, because as you get close to the trauma, their mind begins generating "flack." They start to lose coherence in the most striking manner. Not uncommonly, linear history breaks down altogether. I call this a "dimensional defense," as they essentially break up time into incomprehensible "bits" that prevent them from being synthesized into an unwanted meaning. Along these lines, Spierenburg writes that adults were so preoccupied with their own concerns, that "they never seemed to remember what it was like to be young."

Not surprisingly, there was "a large measure of indifference" toward sucklings in particular. Any parent who had the financial means to do so, simply placed the infant with a wet nurse, even though (because?) this greatly raised the chances of mortality. Stone cites much evidence of "culpable neglect" for the astonishing rates of infant mortality, from lack of attention in the first few critical weeks of life to outright abandonment of the child. Even if left at a the doorway of a church or foundling hospital, the rate of death was astronomical. Hazards were everywhere -- death from fevers during teething, worms, contaminated water, poisonous pewter dishes, inadequate milk supply. Dead and butchered animals were left to decay in the street, latrines were adjacent to water supplies, open pits were used as common graves, only covered over when full. "In 1742 Dr. Johnson described London as a city 'which abounds with such heaps of filth as a savage would look on in amazement.'" Human excrement was everywhere, which lead to constant outbreaks of bacterial stomach infections. The medical profession "was almost entirely helpless," since even their theories of disease were catastrophically wrong. Not a single disease was properly understood. For example, a doctor might treat cataracts by blowing dried and powdered human excrement into the eye.

Spierenburg writes that "when a child died, the parents felt hardly any grief, thinking the loss of one would no doubt be compensated by another birth." In the contemporary West, we call such a person "Schizoid" -- that is, someone who is curiously indifferent to intimate relationships. It's more common than you may realize, and in fact, most "normal" neurotics might have some schizoid "envelopes" that essentially form closed sub-systems within the psyche (this would be a typical form of mind parasite). Consider the "great" Rousseau, who had five children with his companion, but abandoned them all without a moment of remorse. In a letter, he casually commented that they were all "put out as foundlings. I have not even kept a note of their dates of birth, so little did I expect to see them again." None of his contemporaries -- including enemies -- chided him for this. Even under the best of circumstances, about half of children had lost at least one parent by the time of adolescence. So to say that attachment, bonding, and intimacy could not flourish under such circumstances is not to criticize them. Again, the great mystery is how modern people broke through that emotional barrier and became.... modern people. Stone writes that in order to "preserve mental stability," parents were naturally "obliged to limit the degree of their psychological involvement with their infant children." Even when wanted, "it was very rash for parents to get too emotionally concerned about creatures whose expectation of life was so very low." In fact, multiple children would often be given the same name, assuming that only one would survive to carry it into the future. It cannot be coincidence that, as infant mortality begins to fall in the mid-18th century, we see a corresponding great rise in affection and intimacy in general.Stone concludes that "it is impossible to stress too heavily the impermanence of the Early Modern family." None of its members "could reasonably expect to remain together for very long, a fact which fundamentally affected all human relationships." To be continued....

Save widows and their families from lives of stigma, harassment and humiliation

Op-Ed Contributor The Mourning After By CHERIE BLAIR Published: December 18, 2007 London

LIKE many people nowadays, I’m the product of a single-parent family. My sister and I were brought up by my mother after my father deserted us when we were young. It must have been very tough for my mother but we children thrived because of a huge amount of support from a big extended family.
When I reflect on the plight of millions of widows across the world, I realize just how fortunate we were. Although we were surrounded by love, widows and their children in many societies are shunned, abused and exploited.
The centuries-old practice of suttee — a widow burning herself alive on her husband’s funeral pyre — has all but vanished. But the few cases of self-immolation that do occur are a reminder of how bleak the future is for many widows.

After a shocking case just five years ago in rural India, a sociologist in Delhi, Susan Visvanathan, explained that the widow who set herself on fire “would have assumed her life would be one of isolation and despair and shame and suffering.”
In rural areas of Nepal and India, widows may still be expected to shave their heads, sleep on the floor and hide from men for the rest of their lives.
In Afghanistan, where two million women have lost their husbands in decades of fighting, widows are prevented from working and have no way to provide for their children. In Tanzania, among other countries, the legal system makes it difficult for widows to inherit their husband’s property.
The result is that many widows and their children are kicked out of their homes, forced to live in abject poverty on the fringes of society, and are prey to abuse, violence and sexual exploitation. With no money to pay for education, the children of widows are pulled out of school. With no education, these children are doomed to spend their lives in the most menial of jobs, if they can find work at all.
This is a huge problem. In India alone, there are estimated to be some 30 million widows struggling to bring up children. Across the developing world, there may be as many as 100 million in a perilous state. Conflict, ethnic cleansing and AIDS are increasing these numbers by the day and creating younger widows. In countries where disease or conflict are most rife, half of all women can be impoverished widows.
Given the scale and nature of this injustice, it’s disturbing that this problem has remained largely invisible. Statistics are too often not kept by national governments. And despite the United Nations’ welcome focus on tackling global poverty and gender inequality, there is no specific mention of widows in its Millennium Development Goals — an oversight that makes it that much more difficult for the international campaign to work.

Improving the situation of widows and their children, however, won’t be easy. A much greater effort is needed from national governments, including, where necessary, an overhaul of legislation to protect the inheritance rights of widows. It would help as well, where possible, to raise the minimum age for marriage. Children of 14 or even younger should not be married off to men as many as 40 years older, not least because they will soon join the ranks of widows.
Governments must be prepared as well to stand up to cultural pressures, however strong, to enforce existing legislation. Many of the countries where widows are treated worst have good laws in place to protect them. The problem is that they are routinely ignored by local communities and seldom enforced.
Any government efforts will have to go hand in hand with a sustained education campaign, letting women know their rights, explaining to local elders the legal protections that exist and informing communities of the long-term damage these injustices are causing to the health and wealth of their societies.
In the end, it is not just widows who lose out because of this damaging prejudice and discrimination. We all do. Only with determination and courage will we be able to save widows and their families from lives of stigma, harassment and humiliation. Cherie Blair, a human rights lawyer, is the president of Loomba Trust, a charity that campaigns for the rights of widows and their children in the developing world.

Men are generally more novelty-seeking than women, and label the boredom of the routine — as midlife crisis

Mind: Crisis? Maybe He’s a Narcissistic Jerk By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. NYT: January 15, 2008

Popularly viewed as a unique developmental birthright of the human species, it supposedly strikes when most of us have finally figured ourselves out — only to discover that we have lost our youth and mortality is on the horizon.
No doubt about it, life in the middle ages can be challenging. (Full disclosure: I’m 51.) What with the first signs of physical decline and the questions and doubts about one’s personal and professional accomplishments, it is a wonder that most of us survive.
Not everyone is so lucky; some find themselves seized by a seemingly irresistible impulse to do something dramatic, even foolish. Everything, it appears, is fair game for a midlife crisis: one’s job, spouse, lover — you name it...

Why do we have to label a common reaction of the male species to one of life’s challenges — the boredom of the routine — as a crisis? True, men are generally more novelty-seeking than women, but they certainly can decide what they do with their impulses.
But surely someone has had a genuine midlife crisis. After all, don’t people routinely struggle with questions like “What can I expect from the rest of my life?” or “Is this all there is?”
Of course. But it turns out that only a distinct minority think it constitutes a crisis. In 1999, the MacArthur Foundation study on midlife development surveyed 8,000 Americans ages 25 to 74. While everyone recognized the term “midlife crisis,” only 23 percent of subjects reported having one. And only 8 percent viewed their crisis as something tied to the realization that they were aging; the remaining 15 percent felt the crisis resulted from specific life events. Strikingly, most people also reported an increased sense of well-being and contentment in middle age.

So what keeps the myth of the midlife crisis alive? The main culprit, I think, is our youth-obsessed culture, which makes a virtue of the relentless pursuit of self-renewal. The news media abound with stories of people who seek to recapture their youth simply by shedding their spouses, quitting their jobs or leaving their families. Who can resist?
Most middle-aged people, it turns out, if we are to believe the definitive survey.
Except, of course, for the few — mainly men, it seems — who find the midlife crisis a socially acceptable shorthand for what you do when you suddenly wake up and discover that you’re not 20 anymore. Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Role and status of the grandmothers if the urban youth is developing a preference for late marriages and deferred child-births

Dadis and Nanis: ROLE AND STATUS IN INDIAN FAMILY AND SOCIETY: A SYMPOSIUM PROPOSAL, PUNE, April, 4-6, 2008, From: "Prakash Chand Mathur" pcmathur1940@rediffmail.com Indain Book Chronicle

DNFT_april2008.doc [~33K]

For all us, grandmothers are a fact of life of, but, surprisingly, there appears to be very little appreciations of their role and status in social science literature encompassing such ‘social’ disciplines likes Sociology and Psychology, let alone the more prosaic disciplines, like Political Science, Public Administration, Law and history; even Philosophy, Theology and Religion offer very little portraiture of grandmothers either those belonging to the family of which one is a progeny or the family of which one is enrolled with deliberate and due mate-selection processes.

In other words while we all know that grandmothers are very much a part of most urban and metropolitan households, but the lack of serious analyses of their role and status is certainly too glaring an academic deficit which must be erased as several divergent change-chains are uprooting the cultural traditions of Indian families as, on the one hand, the proportion of 60-plus persons is steadily rising but, on the other, the proportion of 21-minus persons is also growing in the Indian’s demographic profiles multiplying the chances of grandmother-grandchildren cohabitation for much longer periods than was the case in, say, the 18th or 19th centuries giving rise to the possibilities of more families having resident grandmothers and , one may even dare to prognosticate, even great-grandmothers than possibly was the case in pre-British villages, towns and cities of India...

AS a (Academic) sequel and also as a serial celebration of grand-mother-hood, DNFT would like to organize, hopefully every year, a 3-day Symposium, to (socio-culturally0 celebrate and (socio-scientifically) calibrate the lives and life-crises of grandmothers in, to being with, urban and metropolitan locales, encompassing nearly 30% of Indian’s total population paying due attention to Literature, Social Science, Demography and Public Policies

Tentatively, the Symposium is scheduled for April, 2008; preferably at Pune (Maharastra, India).While more details are being worked out this Call for Expression of Interest is being broadcast on the occasion of the release ceremony of DADI - NANI: MEMORIES OF OUR GRANDMOTHERS edited by Subash Mathur and Subodh Mathur and published by Spenta Multi-Media, Mumbai.

P.C.Mathur, Symposium Coordinator, Jaipur, Tel:-94148-52747
Ashok Mathur, MT, DNFT, Pune, Tel: 98231-23050

If you're too polite or too soft you don't get taken seriously

Does India make you aggressive?
Posted by Peter Foster on 16 Jan 2008 at 12:04 Tags: India, Delhi, Driving, crowds, aggression

Without 'sharp elbows', you'd never get anywhere in India

Her reply, after some thought, struck me. She said, "I'm not sure I'd want to stay in India forever, it makes you too aggressive."

I've been thinking about this in recent days and I think my friend has a serious point.
India is a tough place to live in. There are 1.1 billion fighting over limited resources - from food, to water, to electricity - and limited space, whether on the roads or in the great slums which where almost half the population of cities like Delhi and Mumbai reside.
Of course as a wealthy ex-pat you are insulated from the real fight for survival which is played out daily in India, however you cannot escape it completely.
Whether driving in New Delhi, shopping in the bazaar or even queuing for check-in at the airport you need to develop - as my mother would put it - "sharp elbows" to get on.
Being passive just doesn't work here. There are no points for politeness as I discovered this early on in my tenure as South Asia Correspondent. Having come from Europe - where charm and politeness will get you a lot further than being tough and forceful - I had to learn a new way of doing things.
I might get shot at a little bit here, but one of the reasons for this phenomenon is the highly stratified nature of Indian society. Bosses are bosses and those below you in the hierarchy expect to be told what to do, just those above you - in age or seniority - expect respect.
It is one of the most exhausting things about living here. You have, to use another English phrase, to "be on everyone's case" to make things happen. If you're too polite or too soft you don't get taken seriously.

And it's not just foreigners who feel this pressure. I have an Indian friend who runs a very successful travel business taking foreign clients on high-end tours round India.
He too gets fed up with the fight. It's not enough to arrange the bus driver to show up at 7am two weeks in advance. You have to check again the night before and then again in the morning of departure to make sure the guy is up and running and on time.
And then, if the bus company owner thinks he can get away with it - ie you're a soft touch - he'll send a different kind of bus than promised, particularly if he's being squeezed by another client he fears more.

Another example. My friend will book a tour group of eight couples into a hotel a full month in advance and the night before their arrival the manager calls asking if it's "okay" if the party gets a couple 'triple rooms' instead of all doubles.
Answer "NO!" - and then my friend spends several hours cracking heads and breaking balls on the phone to enforce the original arrangement. Sadly, if you don't yell, you don't get.
This is not just about being a 'stroppy sahib', if affects all strata of society here. You have to be tough to survive - at whatever level your karma has set your station.
All the above is intended as observation, not criticism. This is the way India is, and there is no point in moaning about it. And of course in a wealthy society - where people are less hungry, actually and metaphorically - it's easier to be civil all the time.
But all the same, I shan't miss the need to "bust balls", to quote my dear late assistant Sanjeev (a master of the art).
I don't consider myself a naturally aggressive person, but I think after four years in India I have become more so. And like my friend, I don't like it. Posted by Peter Foster on 16 Jan 2008 at 12:04 telegraph.co.uk Telegraph Blogs Foreign Blog Home Peter Foster Blog Home

She alone is left with this ordeal of sorrow and public shame

Op-Ed Contributor Sex and the Teenage Girl By CAITLIN FLANAGAN NYT: January 13, 2008 Los Angeles
THE movie “Juno” is a fairy tale about a pregnant teenager who decides to have her baby, place it for adoption and then get on with her life. For the most part, the tone of the movie is comedic and jolly, but there is a moment when Juno tells her father about her condition, and he shakes his head in disappointment and says, “I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when.”

Female viewers flinch when he says it, because his words lay bare the bitterly unfair truth of sexuality: female desire can bring with it a form of punishment no man can begin to imagine, and so it is one appetite women and girls must always regard with caution. Because Juno let her guard down and had a single sexual experience with a sweet, well-intentioned boy, she alone is left with this ordeal of sorrow and public shame.
In the movie, the moment passes. Juno finds a yuppie couple eager for a baby, and when the woman tries to entice her with the promise of an open adoption, the girl shakes her head adamantly: “Can’t we just kick it old school? I could just put the baby in a basket and send it your way. You know, like Moses in the reeds.”
It’s a hilarious moment, and the sentiment turns out to be genuine. The final scene of the movie shows Juno and her boyfriend returned to their carefree adolescence, the baby — safely in the hands of his rapturous and responsible new mother — all but forgotten. Because I’m old enough now that teenage movie characters evoke a primarily maternal response in me (my question during the film wasn’t “What would I do in that situation?” but “What would I do if my daughter were in that situation?”), the last scene brought tears to my eyes. To see a young daughter, faced with the terrible fact of a pregnancy, unscathed by it and completely her old self again was magical.
And that’s why “Juno” is a fairy tale. As any woman who has ever chosen (or been forced) to kick it old school can tell you, surrendering a baby whom you will never know comes with a steep and lifelong cost. Nor is an abortion psychologically or physically simple. It is an invasive and frightening procedure, and for some adolescent girls it constitutes part of their first gynecological exam. I know grown women who’ve wept bitterly after abortions, no matter how sound their decisions were. How much harder are these procedures for girls, whose moral and emotional universe is just taking shape?
Even the much-discussed pregnancy of 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears reveals the rudely unfair toll that a few minutes of pleasure can exact on a girl. The very fact that the gossip magazines are still debating the identity of the father proves again that the burden of sex is the woman’s to bear. He has a chance to maintain his privacy, but if she becomes pregnant by mistake, soon all the world will know.

Pregnancy robs a teenager of her girlhood. This stark fact is one reason girls used to be so carefully guarded and protected — in a system that at once limited their horizons and safeguarded them from devastating consequences. The feminist historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg has written that “however prudish and ‘uptight’ the Victorians were, our ancestors had a deep commitment to girls.”
We, too, have a deep commitment to girls, and ours centers not on protecting their chastity, but on supporting their ability to compete with boys, to be free — perhaps for the first time in history — from the restraints that kept women from achieving on the same level. Now we have to ask ourselves this question: Does the full enfranchisement of girls depend on their being sexually liberated? And if it does, can we somehow change or diminish among the very young the trauma of pregnancy, the occasional result of even safe sex?
Biology is destiny, and the brutally unfair outcome that adolescent sexuality can produce will never change. Twenty years ago, I taught high school in a town near New Orleans. There was a girls’ bathroom next to my classroom, which was more convenient for me than the faculty one on the other side of campus. In the last stall, carved deeply into the metal box reserved for used sanitary napkins, was the single word “Please.”
Whoever had written it had taken a long time; the word was etched so deeply into the metal that she must have worked on it over several days, hiding in there on hall passes or study breaks, desperate. I never knew who wrote it, or when, but I always knew exactly what that anonymous girl meant. When I looked out over the girls moving through the hallways between classes, I wondered if she was among them, and I hoped that her prayer had been answered.
Caitlin Flanagan, the author of “To Hell With All That,” is working on a book about the emotional lives of pubescent girls.

A usable past for a society increasingly aware of its multiracial character

Op-Ed Contributor Forgotten Step Toward Freedom By ERIC FONER NYT: December 30, 2007 WE Americans live in a society awash in historical celebrations. The last few years have witnessed commemorations of the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase (2003) and the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II (2005). Looming on the horizon are the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth (2009) and the sesquicentennial of the outbreak of the Civil War (2011). But one significant milestone has gone strangely unnoticed: the 200th anniversary of Jan. 1, 1808, when the importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited.

This neglect stands in striking contrast to the many scholarly and public events in Britain that marked the 2007 bicentennial of that country’s banning of the slave trade. There were historical conferences, museum exhibits, even a high-budget film, “Amazing Grace,” about William Wilberforce, the leader of the parliamentary crusade that resulted in abolition.
What explains this divergence? Throughout the 1780s, the horrors of the Middle Passage were widely publicized on both sides of the Atlantic and by 1792 the British Parliament stood on the verge of banning the trade. But when war broke out with revolutionary France, the idea was shelved. Final prohibition came in 1807 and it proved a major step toward the abolition of slavery in the empire.
The British campaign against the African slave trade not only launched the modern concern for human rights as an international principle, but today offers a usable past for a society increasingly aware of its multiracial character. It remains a historic chapter of which Britons of all origins can be proud.

In the United States, however, slavery not only survived the end of the African trade but embarked on an era of unprecedented expansion. Americans have had to look elsewhere for memories that ameliorate our racial discontents, which helps explain our recent focus on the 19th-century Underground Railroad as an example (widely commemorated and often exaggerated) of blacks and whites working together in a common cause.
Nonetheless, the abolition of the slave trade to the United States is well worth remembering. Only a small fraction (perhaps 5 percent) of the estimated 11 million Africans brought to the New World in the four centuries of the slave trade were destined for the area that became the United States. But in the Colonial era, Southern planters regularly purchased imported slaves, and merchants in New York and New England profited handsomely from the trade.
The American Revolution threw the slave trade and slavery itself into crisis. In the run-up to war, Congress banned the importation of slaves as part of a broader nonimportation policy. During the War of Independence, tens of thousands of slaves escaped to British lines. Many accompanied the British out of the country when peace arrived.
Inspired by the ideals of the Revolution, most of the newly independent American states banned the slave trade. But importation resumed to South Carolina and Georgia, which had been occupied by the British during the war and lost the largest number of slaves.
The slave trade was a major source of disagreement at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. South Carolina’s delegates were determined to protect slavery, and they had a powerful impact on the final document. They originated the three-fifths clause (giving the South extra representation in Congress by counting part of its slave population) and threatened disunion if the slave trade were banned, as other states demanded.
The result was a compromise barring Congress from prohibiting the importation of slaves until 1808. Some Anti-Federalists, as opponents of ratification were called, cited the slave trade clause as a reason why the Constitution should be rejected, claiming it brought shame upon the new nation.

The outbreak of the slave revolution in Haiti in the early 1790s sent shock waves of fear throughout the American South and led to new state laws barring the importation of slaves. But in 1803, as cotton cultivation spread, South Carolina reopened the trade. The Legislature of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory also allowed the importation of slaves. From 1803 to 1808, between 75,000 and 100,000 Africans entered the United States.
By this time, the international slave trade was widely recognized as a crime against humanity. In 1807, Congress prohibited the importation of slaves from abroad, to take effect the next New Year’s Day, the first date allowed by the Constitution.
For years thereafter, free African-Americans celebrated Jan. 1 as an alternative to July 4, when, in their view, patriotic orators hypocritically proclaimed the slave-owning United States a land of liberty.
It is easy to understand, however, why the trade’s abolition appears so anticlimactic. Banning American participation in the slave trade did not end the shipment of Africans to the Western Hemisphere. Some three million more slaves were brought to Brazil and Spanish America before the trade finally ended. With Southerners dominating the federal government for most of the period before the Civil War, enforcement was lax and the smuggling of slaves into the United States continued.

Those who hoped that ending American participation in the slave trade would weaken or destroy slavery were acutely disappointed. In the United States, unlike the West Indies, the slave population grew by natural increase. This was not because American owners were especially humane, but because most of the South lies outside the tropical environment where diseases like yellow fever and malaria exacted a huge toll on whites and blacks alike.
As slavery expanded into the Deep South, a flourishing internal slave trade replaced importation from Africa. Between 1808 and 1860, the economies of older states like Virginia came increasingly to rely on the sale of slaves to the cotton fields of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. But demand far outstripped supply, and the price of slaves rose inexorably, placing ownership outside the reach of poorer Southerners.
Let us imagine that the African slave trade had continued in a legal and open manner well into the 19th century. It is plausible to assume that hundreds of thousands if not millions of Africans would have been brought into the country.

This most likely would have resulted in the “democratization” of slavery as prices fell and more and more whites could afford to purchase slaves, along with a further increase in Southern political power thanks to the Constitution’s three-fifths clause. These were the very reasons advanced by South Carolina’s political leaders when they tried, unsuccessfully, to reopen the African slave trade in the 1850s.
More slaves would also have meant heightened fear of revolt and ever more stringent controls on the slave population. It would have reinforced Southerners’ demands to annex to the United States areas suitable for plantation slavery in the Caribbean and Central America. Had the importation of slaves continued unchecked, the United States could well have become the hemispheric slave-based empire of which many Southerners dreamed.
Jan. 1, 1808, is worth commemorating not only for what it directly accomplished, but for helping to save the United States from a history even more terrible than the Civil War that eventually rid our country of slavery. Eric Foner is a professor of history at Columbia University.

The whole notion of men and women being “complementary but equal” is hypocritical

ned said, on December 28th, 2007 at 6:58 pm Dear Ali,

Perchance that this might be useful to this topic, I offer a mystical understanding of the male-female symbolism, the original dualism, as you insightfully put it, below. I believe this dualistic perception of man and woman as eternally separate is intimately connected to the perceived duality between Creator and creation as well. This is part of an essay I’m working on regarding the subject of gender and spirituality.

“The male and female represent an extended parable for the Divine and human life. In this instance, the masculine principle is the moving, approaching, desiring, penetrating, adventuresome divine impulse, which woos and seeks to unite with us in the realm of the feminine principle as willing, conscious beings, but will not enter without a complete and unreserved invitations, which is submission and reception, welcoming, and on both sides of course is Delight.
For those who by complete surrender receive the divine Presence intimately, there is a seed implanted, which in some spiritual traditions is called the Word, which must be nurtured, and must grow, and take on equally the qualities of (as it were) both parents meaning, in this case, the Absolute and the particular, the Divine and the human. This is a process which takes time, just like gestation, which is a living parable for it. And what is brought forth in the fullness of time, the product of Love in both its adventurous and receptive modes, and of ongoing suffering during the time of silence and waiting has all the possibilities in it of new life and energy for the salvation of the world.
Ultimately what emerges in this cosmic romance is the realization that it is nondual — that there is no divide between man and woman, Spirit and matter, Creator and creation.”

The crucial point here is that actually what the metaphor means is that *both* men and women (at the human and relative level) are to take a “feminine” position with respect to the Divine — and *both* will rise to their “manhood” through this relationship with the Divine. The metaphor is so beautiful, but look at the havoc it has caused in every religion and in every age because people took it literally! I always maintain that religious literalists are in fact materialists. They can only see physical thoughtforms, and not see the Reality pointed to by them — hence their spiritual poverty and moral hypocrisies.

The reason I bring this up is that I recently read “The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought” by Prof. Sachiko Murata which tries to justify the inferiority of women using precisely this sort of traditionalist cosmological reasoning, seeing man and woman as eternally opposed polarities of the universe. Murata quotes Sufi mystics like Ibn al-Arabi and Imam Ghazali to make her point. As a non-Muslim (but nevertheless as a spiritual aspirant), my personal understanding of this issue may not hold much water for an Islamic audience, but I found this book dry and mental, and found that Prof. Murata was just reading Ibn al-Arabi and the others in a purely intellectual way without ever touching the mystical core of what they were talking about. In other words, the book was too much head, and not enough heart (which was ironic because she was actually trying to show that the intellect is masculine and the soul is feminine, thus leading me to question *her* femininity ;-) ).

There was another book I read that reinterpreted the entire treatment of gender in the Quran in a Sufi way. All references to “woman” were interpreted as meaning the body, and all references to “man” were interpreted as meaning the soul, on a deeper esoteric level. This corresponds exactly to the Vedantic conception of the Purusha (soul) and Prakriti (nature, matter), and similar conceptions in other religions. This book was “Women in the Holy Quran: A Sufi Perspective” by Lynn Wilcox. What Wilcox was trying to get across, and what I’m suggesting from an esoteric perspective, is that both men *and* women belong to the realm of Prakitri. It is only delusion that leads men to think that they are intrinsically superior to women. The close we get to the Absolute, the more all these egoic distinctions start to blur and eventually disappear. My understanding is that everything is equal in the Absolute, the distinctions are all relative.

ned said, on December 28th, 2007 at 7:15 pm

One additional point I want to make is that the whole notion of men and women being “complementary but equal”, an assertion that traditionalists of virtually every religion often make (again using this cosmological reasoning), is hypocritical for many reasons. One is that in practice this sort of “benevolent patriarchy” always means that men get positions of leadership, value and meaning, whereas women are always relegated to the more boring or less intellectually challenging work. It amplifies the differences between men and women where what is in fact needed is for the man to develop more of his yin side and for the woman to develop more of her yang side. The whole thing is circular — it’s as if they are saying, men and women are eternally completely separate and different, because, well, we say so, and we’ll do everything we can to prevent anyone else from exploring other possibilities. It’s just so entrapping and spiritually toxic and doesn’t allow us to grow as human beings.

Referring to Prof. Murata’s book, I actually found her comparisons of Islam to Taoism pretty unconvincing — I mean I found it pretty unconvincing that she was talking about Taoism at all. She relied mainly on the I Ching, a text that is just as Confucian as it is Taoistic. The Tao te Ching on the other hand contains statements like the following:

“Know the masculine, but keep to the feminine: and become a watershed to the world. If you embrace the world, the Tao will never leave you and you become as a little child.” (Ch. 28)

So in the end Prof. Murata relies much more on Confucian notions of a divinely-ordained social hierarchy rather than the free-floating abandon and anarchism of Lao-tzu. And we don’t even need to talk about how much such rigid notions of gender have hurt people who are strictly speaking neither physically male nor physically female. As far as traditionalists are concerned, such people don’t even exist (or don’t deserve to).

Benefit from countless transactions among millions of strangers

Adam Smith Was Not Schizophrenic! from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy

Given interdependence of each on others, many, probably most, of whom we are unlikely ever to know, it is well that we can benefit from their actions without it being necessary for the happy bonds of ‘mutual love and affection’ to exist among us.

We only ever know a few of our relatives; cousins twice removed are usually strangers of whom we may know nothing at all. Our circle of friends is also limited, and while our acquaintances are a larger set of people, they are still dwarfed in numbers by the billions on the planet (even the millions in our respective countries’ or even those who live in the same town).

When Smith was teaching his classes, using materials that appeared in Wealth of Nations 17 years later, he focused on this factor in human life and explained how people could be in complex exchange links many intersections long and could still benefit from countless transactions among millions of strangers with whom feelings of ‘mutual love and affection’ were not realistic nor necessary. The key was the 'mercenary exchange of good offices' (TMS), or market-based exchanges, as elaborated in Wealth Of Nations.

Perversions are an essential way in which the human mind and psyche rebel against and seek to evade reality

Sexual and Textual Perverts in Islam and the West
from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob

Just yesterday there was a very important piece at American Thinker by psychiatrist Stephen Rittenberg, entitled Liberalism, Jihadism and Perversion. He points out the difficulty of "diagnosing" the barbaric jihadis -- as if they are Western psychopaths, when they are actually just craven conformists in the context of their own culture:

"It is the intense pleasure derived from religiously sanctioned murderous lust that makes the jihadis so dangerous. The degree of narcissism matters little; these are not people who can be 'treated' by shoring up their narcissism, and bolstering their self esteem. It is our very civilized, therapeutic culture that makes us flinch from taking the necessary measures needed to deal with such foes. In truth, it may be our own narcissism -- the need to reassure ourselves of our superior civilized nature -- that causes us to obsess about whether necessary measures for waging war, like water boarding, and Guantanamo constitute 'torture'."

Thus -- and this is a critical point -- there is actually an implicit dynamic between the bloodthirsty psychopaths of Islam and the narcissistic enablers of the left, and that is perversion. And what is perversion? Importantly, sexual acting out is not synonymous with perversion, but an effect of something much deeper. As Rittenberg explains, perversions are not just "sexual" in the more narrow behavioral sense of the term. Rather, they embody the idea

"that erotic pleasure [can] be intensified by the discharge of aggressive wishes, including the inflicting of, and submitting to, pain up to the point of death."

Rittenberg refers to the theories of Chasseguet-Smirgel, who

"found that perversions are an essential way in which the human mind and psyche rebel against and seek to evade reality,"

including the reality of male-female differences:

"The intolerance and fear of such differences can result in the practices of Wahabbi Islam, wherein women are so feared that they must be hidden and brutalized like beasts of the field. Muslim men's terror of women is undoubtedly accompanied by a high incidence of hidden (not so hidden when they travel to the Riviera) perverse sexuality."

This is true as far as it goes, but the question is, how do people -- and whole cultures -- end up this way? That is a question psychoanalysis in itself is unequipped to answer, since it is essentially a clinical practice that focuses on adult individuals as opposed to field study into, say, Muslim childrearing practices. This is what deMause's research attempts to do -- to link the kind of gross perversion we see in the Islamic world to concrete childrearing practices.

Such sweeping can be even more dangerous than anger itself

Reflections: On anger from Rarefactions: by Andrés Melo Cousineau by amelo14

This post is a reflection on anger. Our society, with its continuous inability to stop and reflect, could actually be called an angry society. Nowhere else would “road rage” be the absolutely appalling phenomenon that it is. Also, the glamorization of violence in some of our youth can only be understood as a self-righteous defense of anger. Likewise, only our society continuously asks us to take courses in anger management; as if anger were a question of economics and not of understanding. Even more striking, our antidote to anger is a certain kind of permanent angry humor that avoids the issue itself, but allegedly gives us a temporary respite. On the contrary, reflective moderation is the necessary antipode to anger.

What is unique about anger is that if I were angry writing about it, I would hardly be able to write it. Of course, we think we could, but anger in its real and cruder form does away with reflection. Just remember the last time you “lost” it. Don’t you remember even kicking inanimate things as if somehow THEY had done you something! Odd indeed. Being angry is being unable to articulate. This is true not only when you yourself become angry and find yourself screaming to the top of your lungs’ possibilities, and at the same time throwing your arms all over the place (specially if you are Latino!). It is also true if you yourself are confronted by anger and remain in a dangerous form of paralyzed silence whose alleged defense is to “take in” the anger and quietly retreat into itself later on. That escape into submissive silence does not help either in understanding the phenomenon of anger, but likewise actually generates in the passive individual an angry posture towards him/herself. Freud has taught us much on this.

Both outward-tending anger and inward-tending anger reduce articulation to its bare minimum. This is, in part, the reason why there is much health to be found in the capacity for articulation, primarily in articulating what is darkest in us as human beings. But the darkest is the most difficult to access. As a matter of fact, speaking about anger and violence is the kind of topic which some in society seem to think is best swept under the rug. But such sweeping can be even more dangerous than anger itself.

When anger does appear, specially politically, it spills its darkness quickly over the whole community as a wildfire incapable of seeing the origins of its perversions. The Balkans are suddenly caught in this dynamic; Rwanda is suddenly caught up in this dynamic, Jews in WWII are suddenly caught up in this dynamic. Or closer to home. Today December 6th we celebrate almost 2 decades since the death of 14 women at L’Ecole Polytechnique at the hand of one angry young man in Montreal. I was living in Montreal at the time and so am unable to forget this infamous event. here Others will remember others; just now people who live in Omaha have their very own tragic case. Even today the issue of anger and violence towards women by many angry men in the private sphere still remains a topic which we find hard to articulate, find hard to recognize and confront in our anger-ridden society.

Why is it so hard to articulate anger? As I said before, precisely because when angry there is no articulation to be done. We all sense this once the anger passes; we look back and can hardly even recognize ourselves! “That was not really me,” we are told by those who live in anger. When you throw the object you can hardly believe you just couldn’t stop yourself. Likewise, it is difficult to articulate because the angry make us afraid for very important reasons, namely, our very emotional and mental security. But not articulating anger should make us even more afraid as anger —unless modified, redirected, or re-articulated— has a prolonged life of its own. We all have some examples of this persistence. I have seen many in my life (specially of the results in those who do not have the tools to confront the angry and therefore interiorize this outwardly generated self-hatred), but I will take up only two; one personal, one philosophical. (more…)

I'm truly embarassed that they share the same gender with me

"TRICKY" ? WESTERN FEMINISTS ARE TRULY PATHETIC

from Dr. Sanity

See here. I'm truly embarassed that they share the same gender with me. For a full discussion of their intellectual and moral bankruptcy, you can check out this earlier post or this one.

Some degree of optimistic self-deception is critical for success

When does self-deception do the most good? from Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen

Knowledge@Wharton: In your chapter, "The Dangerous and Necessary Art of Self-Deception," you write that some degree of optimistic self-deception is critical for success, and that "depressive realists," with their more accurate view of the world, fall behind. What advice would you give to a board choosing a CEO? Is it better to have an optimistic self-deceiver or a depressive realist?

Cowen: For a CEO, I'd tend to go for the realist, because at the leadership level, the costs of hubris are very high. The problem with realists is they can get depressed and feel they are not going anywhere, but this is less likely to happen to CEOs, because they are in charge.

In the lower rungs of the company, however, I would favor overly optimistic people, those who are motivated by the idea that they always have a chance of being promoted or earning more money. The higher up you are, the more I would prefer realism. A president who won't listen can be pretty disastrous. But a senator who doesn't listen -- maybe it's not ideal, but there are checks and balances, and if the optimism gets the senator to work harder, then that is the compensation.

Here is the full interview with me.

By the way here is a recent Indian review of Inner Economist, from Mint.

I am not arguing for a monocausal theory (like the so-called “vulgar-marxist” one that would reduce everything to an ultimate economic “base”)

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

Steven Shaviro The Pinocchio Theory

David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is filled with interesting and provocative ideas. Graeber wants to ally the discipline of anthropology with the anarchist currents that have shown up, most recently, in the anti-globalization movement. Each, he says, has a lot to offer the other...

Graeber is far more interesting when he writes about what anthropology can offer anarchism: a wider range of both social theory and observation of social practices than is available in orthodox Western theory and philosophy alone. Graeber discusses Marcel Mauss’ theory of the gift as an alternative to orthodox economic assumptions about the centrality of markets and “exchange”, and Pierre Clastres’ arguments about societies that explicitly sought to avoid the formation of a State. He cites numerous anthropological examples of social formations that have not taken on the form of State authority, or that have existed in the interstices of States and that have “autonomized” themselves or exempted themselves from its control. He suggests ways that we can dispense with the myth of “revolution” as some ultimate and complete rupture with the past, without thereby resigning ourselves to what hardcore Marxists used to disparage as mere “reformism.” And, paralleling arguments that I am more familiar with in other fields (given my limited knowledge of anthropology), he critiques the common assumption that “modernity” itself represents a radical break from all the rest of human history. And I haven’t even scratched the surface here of the wide range of Graeber’s historical examples and theoretical suggestions.

Graeber’s ideas are rich and wide-ranging; he pushes us to expand the boundaries of what we admit to be possible, or even thinkable. It’s very much the exhilarating spirit of May 1968: be realistic, demand the impossible; though Graeber rightly does not couch his exhortations in the form of an appeal to return to the 1960s, or to any other mythologized past of radical political hope. There is, thankfully, no nostalgia, and no call to order, or reverencing of past political models, in this book.

The main problem I have with Graeber’s argument is this. Graeber’s emphasis on the State as the enemy misconstrues, I believe, the role of the “market,” and of concentrations of capital. Like many other anarchists, Graeber is all too ready to see “free market” capitalism, commodification and consumption, and the wage system itself — all of which he denounces — as being adjuncts and epiphenomena of State power. This seems to me to be exactly wrong. While capitalist markets, the wage system, the private ownership of the means of production, the ever-increasing “branding” and commodification and corporate appropriation of all forms of human creativity and activity, and so on, of course could not sustain themselves without relying upon State power, and more generally without exerting and monopolizing power in the political realm, this does not make them functions of State power. It does not follow that State power comes first, either pragmatically or ideologically. Rather the reverse. Marxist political economy, and Foucaultian analytics of power, different as they are from one another, both view State power as an effect and an instrument of social, political, technological, and economic power relations, rather than as the source, or the most basic component, of those relations.

I am not arguing for a monocausal theory (like the so-called “vulgar-marxist” one that would reduce everything to an ultimate economic “base”); and I don’t think that Graeber, in his focus on the State, is monocausally reductionist either. (He mentions, among other things, the differences between the State as an ideal, and the actual ways that peoples’ lives are controlled and constrained, and points out that these two need not correspond). But I do think the difference in emphasis is crucial. For one thing, Graeber’s overestimation of the importance of the State leads him to underestimate other (non-state) impediments to freedom. How successful can “self-organization” be, today, in the absence of any economic resources? Graeber adopts the Italian autonomists’ ideas about “exodus” and “engaged withdrawal” from “capitalism and the liberal state” (60ff), but he ignores, again, the autonomists’ grounding in political economy. There are a lot of things worse than the “liberal state.” So-called “free enterprise,” for one thing. The dismantling of the welfare state in the US and other Western countries over the last quarter-century has not led to more opportunities for self-organization and empowerment, but less. States have increasingly withdrawn from what Manuel Castells calls the “black holes of informational capitalism,” but the people unfortunate enough to be stuck in those black holes are still subject to the terror of the “free market,” and what Marxists used to call “the international division of labor.”

When Graeber really lost me, though, was with his praise of decision-making through “consensus,” instead of compulsion. Me, I don’t see much of a difference between having to obey hateful and stupid orders issued by clueless assholes (the Leninist model as well as the State and corporate one), and having to sit in meetings for hours on end while the same clueless assholes make endless objections and qualifications that all have to be worked through before the meeting can come to an end. It’s torture either way, and I’m not convinced that the one method is even any more “democratic” than the other. Anarchist “consensus” is just another way of enforcing conformity and group solidarity, by wearing people down until they are browbeaten into agreement; it’s every bit as stifling and oppressive as military hierarchies and fraternity initiations and the “discipline” of the “free market” are. Empirically, different mixtures of these procedures might be more or less oppressive, less or more democratic, in particular instances; there are cases where the looser form of self-determination that Graeber praises might be welcome in comparison to the alternatives. But let’s not kid ourselves that decision-making through “consensus” somehow eliminates inequalities of power, or that it expands human freedom, or that it’s a desirable social ideal. This entry was posted on Thursday, August 5th, 2004 at 9:10 pm and is filed under Books, Politics. RSS 2.0 feed.

One of the reasons fewer women marry is because of the ideological success of feminism

Thoughts on the Intrinsic Madness of the Left from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob

Therefore, it should not surprise us that the Democrat party is the anti-marriage party, since the more people marry, the worse things are for them. To put it another way, their electoral success is directly tied to the weakening and/or destruction of the family as we know it. But I would guess that for most people -- and I don't need a study to prove this -- the greatest source of their happiness -- not to mention, mental stability -- is their family. Thus, the Democrats must again be the party of unhappiness and mental illness if they are to be a party at all.

One of the reasons fewer women marry is because of the ideological success of feminism, which has brainwashed women into believing that there are no intrinsic differences between men and women, and that a women certainly does not require a man or children to find fulfillment and to be happy. Thus, to the extent that a woman does possess a higher archetype of femininity, or that she requires loving relationship with a good man in order to find fulfillment, she will have a void that cannot be named and therefore addressed.

True, some women are no doubt happier droning away at some meaningless job than they are in being married and raising children, but it's not as many as feminists would have you think. Mrs. G. for example, thought she was happy as a career woman, but it turned out she wasn't -- that it was just a compensation for a choice she had been brainwashed not to make. 7:40 AM