Making our peace

by Maria on June 17, 2016

On Wednesday, I gave a talk about the Internet of Things in relation to ‘smart cities’, inequality, and high modernism. As a topic, it sounds a bit like the addressing system Mongolia has just decided to implement, where three random nouns – apple.truck.envelope – are used to represent a place instead of, say, a street-name, townland or unmemorable grid reference. (But actually, there is a there, there in my talk. Combining three parts from another naming system is the clue: ‘James’, ‘C’ and ‘Scott’.) In the Q&A, there was a question about how the platforms we design for good are used for evil. How/should we deal with that?

My answer was a hostage to fortune. I said we needed to chill the hell out about bad things happening and understand that the Internet reflects or even amplifies what is still, basically, human nature. That’s the kind of thing you can say between bad things happening, when the horror is ebbing just a little and the next awfulness hasn’t yet occurred. I still think it’s the right answer, but I’d give a lot to erase the hands-upturned shrug I did at the end.

How do we make our peace with the fact that yesterday an MP was savagely assassinated outside her constituency clinic? It would be hard at the best of times, but at a historical moment when violent ill-feeling is being stoked by right-wing politicians and newspapers, we can’t just shrug, as I did, and say this is a regrettable and awful cost of doing democratic business.

We can and do make peace with risks in public service that are made worse by the self-interested acts of others. A family member had to check under his car for explosives every morning for years, in a political environment made toxic by the IRA’s mainstream apologists and also years of self-righteous Tory refusal to engage. (The same party currently sees no problem with a Northern Ireland Secretary who puts Ruritarian escape fantasies before the legal underpinnings of the Good Friday agreement.) But personal physical risk can be just one small part of public life; I remember my relative joking at the time that the biggest worry he had while poking around behind the tyres was that of putting his back out.

For my own part, I waved off the love of my life to Helmand Province, knowing full well the job could have been finished a decade before, if Blair + co hadn’t gotten simultaneously bored with it and infatuated with GW Bush’s Iraq War. Or indeed, if in 2006 the toxic combination of military can-do spirit and politicians’ desires to keep moving the narrative forward had somehow not resulted in Britain taking on that unmanageable province. (Goodness only knows what the relatives of soldiers who died in Iraq must have felt and still feel.) But when you’re thinking about losing someone, you’re mostly thinking just about losing them. Slight exacerbants barely register – and that much is likely right and true.

But this assassination and the political climate it happened in are not something we should be making peace with.

At lunchtime yesterday, just as this assassination took place, I was walking through Westminster, talking on the phone to a cousin who also lives in the UK. The traffic slowed as a big, purple UKIP bus rolled through, blaring out music and demonising refugees. The tourists took bemused selfies. The rest of us just wanted to cross the road and get away. It reminds you that the audience for stunts and such is never the people there, but the consumers of pre-chewed media cud.

When we could hear ourselves again, my cousin and I each said in different ways how shocked/not-shocked we were by the past few weeks in Britain. Or, let’s be honest, England. The insularity, the ignorance, the mean-minded ugliness of the campaigns seemed to magnify and put in the centre some parts of English political culture we’d either not noticed or dismissed as fringe. The last few weeks of increasingly toxic, anti-immigrant campaigning have seemed a bit like finding out through the grapevine that a guy you slightly know is a domestic abuser. The shock and repulsion unite with a sick thrill of recognition as memories of his pushing it too far jokes, attention-seeking and general touchiness re-shuffle themselves into a years-long narrative arc of barely-concealed misogyny. Somehow, you now say to yourself, you always knew.

Today, the campaign has paused. For a day, or maybe even for the next week, the pantomime villains have put their costumes back in the dressing up box. Perhaps, for some of the out campaign’s leaders, the past few weeks will turn out to have been a regrettable, embarrassing, out of character tantrum. And not, as I darkly thought yesterday morning before the murder, an attempted right-wing coup.

Political cultures are weird; more for what can’t be said or for the distorted way certain things are allowed to be expressed than for their face value. Working and lower middle class people in the UK have indeed been sold a pup. For all the talk about ‘competitiveness’, no one has taken the trouble to explain that quality blue-collar jobs have not really been stolen by immigrants. Those jobs have gone to China and then to the robots and they’re not coming back. No one has a credible idea for what to do about it. Wages are held down by immigrants competing, yes, and also by a government that insists on paying apprentices £3.30 an hour, and is now forcing student nurses to pay while they do the scut work many NHS wards depend on.

Nor have immigrants hoovered up all the GP appointments and school places; austerity has hacked at the health service and ideology insists new school places are created not out of need but wherever an academy feels like setting up shop. State schools are becoming unaccountable battery farms where the children of the 93% are force-fed rote-learning, obsessively measured and their SATs found wanting, all the better to train them for working lives of unimaginative obedience in rapidly disappearing call centres. Meanwhile, the upper middle classes say they can’t live comfortably on 200k p.a. while privately educating their children in schools that offer art, music and lush, green playing fields. They see what’s coming and jostle each other out of the way as they panic-buy the last few bolts of social capital.

We have systemic problems but we do not have a systemic conversation. Instead, we have convenient whipping boys. It used to be the Irish and Caribbeans. Now it’s the Poles and the Syrians. As Charles Stross put it, fascism is coming to Britain, “wearing a tweed jacket and a cheeky grin, holding a pint of beer in one hand and a noose in the other.”

Maybe it was inevitable that both campaigns would fill an information vacuum with the ugliest of England’s sub-conscious. In contrast to the EU campaigns I worked on in Ireland during the nineties (admittedly more innocent times, before the European Commission and IMF ripped up our democratic process to bail out the bondholders), this campaign seemed astonishingly fact-free. The UK has no public baseline of understanding what the EU does and doesn’t do. If it did, we might have heard competing visions of how or whether it’s possible to reform the EU, what it’s done that has been good and bad, or some recognition of things like policy-laundering by member-states – notably the UK. Hell, we might even have heard a bit more from a few MEPs.

All we got were scare stories from both sides, and impassioned cries to take Britain back. To the Stone Age, presumably. In recent days the campaign evolved into a manifesto-less plebiscite on a new, even more right-wing government, post-referendum. No wonder headlines and airwaves were stuffed with part-facts, misinformation and all the nightmarish dross of people’s worst fears.

Seriously. Jung would have a field day with this shit.

And yesterday an alleged neo-Nazi butchered a woman as she went about the humdrum quotidien of late-capitalist democracy.

I know about a dozen women who are a little bit like Jo Cox. (I didn’t know her, though I think we have some friends/acquaintances in common.) A few of us even self-identify as girly swots – not to be confused with head girls, completely different tribe – who have a winning ticket what with being white and being/becoming and middle class, but we’re also women in patriarchy, with all that brings (punished for being pushy, points stolen at meetings, bit of online misogyny, all that stupid stuff). We see a lot that needs changing, but are socialised into people-pleasing. We do jobs in nonprofits and the civil service. We sit on school boards or Church committees. A tiny number go into electoral politics. Most of us are the support staff. We come into our own in our thirties and forties, and accept with good grace that we won’t go all that far. We politely budge up on the small bench set aside for all the others who were locked out, thinking it sad but correct that we don’t get a special moment in sun. We work towards doggedly incremental social democratic goals. They don’t much nourish the ego, but our small in-system changes improve things for a few people in the foreseeable – though it doesn’t pass our notice that the whole thing is screwed. We organise book clubs and nurse each other through bad bosses and break-ups and cancer scares. For those that have them, we look after each other’s kids. We help each other persevere.

So for one of us – and I know it is presumption to even loosely associate myself with one of Shelley’s ‘day stars of the age’ – to be killed so horribly. So horribly. And though it stings to know that a woman is more mourned if she is lucky enough to be a mother, I, too, can’t think of those two children and the party they were to have this weekend and not weep again.

This week has gone on for far too long already. I really didn’t and don’t want to be writing one of these ‘what does it all mean’ essays. For one thing, there’s no fucking point. We pass around links on Twitter to people’s pieces on the latest atrocity saying ‘this one really nails it’. Or get tangled up in some solipsistic meta-discussion about the doctoring of the piece that really got it before it was censored. And for another, writing is just another narcissistic act in an aggressively subjective culture.

Peace isn’t an endgame. It isn’t even an equilibrium. (OK, maybe when it works it’s a pearl-string of contiguous Nash equilibria, each of them worked out the hard bloody way.) It’s a process that’s never finished and more people are always turning up to argue for their piece of it. I think we should be trying to ‘make peace’ with this, in some form that recognizes it as a fundamentally right-wing political act. And we make peace better in small, steady, instrumental acts than big expressive ones. Obviously. But ugly compromises and the things that can’t be said about them do damage. We just can’t predict how or when. Maybe the girly swots win in the end just by wanting it less. Maybe no one does. And beyond that? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

{ 64 comments }

1

Chris Bertram 06.17.16 at 7:29 pm

Thank you Maria.

2

bob mcmanus 06.17.16 at 7:55 pm

Thank you.

3

novakant 06.17.16 at 8:37 pm

thank you

4

Placeholder 06.17.16 at 8:40 pm

“It used to be the Irish” Funny you say that because the “alleged neo-Nazi” is also alleged Britain First and they’re Ulster Unionist Maria. Jim Dowson led the campaign to keep the abortion ban and the flag riots of 2012.

Who’s the last elected representative assassinated by a British terrorist? No googling – you have to heard about it any newspaper in the English speaking world.
“At about 2:10am, Diana Fullerton was awoken by her husband shouting, “What’s that, what’s that?” and she heard very loud banging noises coming from downstairs (this was the attackers breaking in through the hall door with a sledgehammer). She saw her husband putting on his trousers and going to the door of the bedroom, out on to the landing. She had gone to a wardrobe to get a coat. She remembers hearing three cracking noises and a young male voice saying, “Come on, come on!” and then two more cracking noises and then the noise of more than one person running on the stairs. Mrs Fullerton found the body of her husband lying in the landing outside the bedroom door, his feet lying towards the bedroom door opposite their bedroom. He had been fatally shot six times.”

5

js. 06.17.16 at 9:23 pm

This is brilliant. Also, it reminds me that I really should read James C Scott already. Thank you.

6

js. 06.18.16 at 12:43 am

Also tho, I still have absolutely no idea what the hell the “internet of things” is supposed to be. I should maybe look into it.

7

William Timberman 06.18.16 at 1:19 am

…a pint of beer in one hand, and a noose in the other… And no clue at all about what they’ll owe — or to whom — when the bill comes due. Must we do this over and over and over again? Yes, I suppose we must. Call it human nature, if you will, but I’m at least somewhat comforted by the occasional confirmation in my day-to-day experience that it’s not all of human nature. (I don’t have to endure UKIP blowhards, or the assassins they can’t seem to help encouraging, but I do live in Arizona, so I’m not unfamiliar with the thoughts you’ve so eloquently expressed here, Maria. As others have already said above, thank you.

8

JeffreyG 06.18.16 at 1:21 am

+1
[Maria these posts are consistently touching; I hope both that you keep writing them and that you never have to write another. :'( ]

9

Lowhim 06.18.16 at 1:40 am

Damn beautiful writing… and well said. Makes me weep; for the state we’re in, and for my own writing skills—I tend to simply write in angry tones. That being said, social progress is indeed a slow business [1] full of compromises and slow progress. Even today it seems hard to be listened to. So keep at it.
Peace? Someone smarter than I once said the opposite of war wasn’t peace but justice. Myself I’m one of those who spent time in Iraq. A fool then. Less so now (I hope). I work towards peace in that incremental way that those without money or power do. [2] I’m not really sure Afghan is the just war everyone claims (eye off the ball “just” when we were winning it) it was. Mainly, one has to wonder about the moral right to carry it out. Work towards peace, right? I know, it’s injustice all the way down, but you’ve gotta start somewhere.

[1] So I’m told, though there’s the nagging feeling that those who benefit from the way the system is, want everyone to believe this.

[2] Cue that picture with Rumsfeld and Cheney et al laughing in the halls of power. Again, how much of this is merely accepting our place like docile animals, rather than going for more?

10

Andrew Montin 06.18.16 at 5:02 am

“… writing is just another narcissistic act in an aggressively subjective culture.”

We need to have a discussion about culture. Jeffrey M. Jackson, drawing on the tradition of Critical Theory from Adorno to Butler, argues persuasively in *Philosophy and Working Through the Past* that our culture does nothing to help people work through the big and small traumas of everyday life; instead it encourages manic-depressive responses which are then exploited by political and commercial operatives. This would explain, on the one hand, the steady stream of alienated, damaged men who are “radicalised” (i.e. retraumatised) and encouraged to act out their violent phantasies to further some depraved political project. And, on the other hand, the unholy marriage between politicians like Trump or Farage and the culture industry, working together to encourage manic responses to the suffering of loss brought about by modernity. Only a radical revitalisation of culture in the face of this madness seems to offer any hope for avoiding a catastrophe.

11

Ronan(rf) 06.18.16 at 8:04 am

Great stuff. The last para in particular Reminds me of ….

“So I’m learning now, as I never learnt before, about what it meant to walk through forests from Congo to Angola and Namibia and back. I’m learning from a man with scarred hands and blackest eyes about how, when you come upon a village in those forests, you are offered armful bounties of fruits, and a bed in the home of a chief. I’m learning about what it was like to have a machine gun fell an uncle in the Caucasus, or to lose a leg to a bomb (and to watch the one-legged man with his own children now, kissing them sweetly on his hollowed lap while still growling at the world). I’m learning how good it felt to come to this quiet plateau in safety, but how constant and drumming the fear of the future still is. I’m learning that the Plateau is made of real people, often very reserved, who might not be quite used to the need for halal meat, or might be a little jarred when the asylum seekers don’t quite know how to handle the grocery store or a dentist’s appointment, or how locals maybe aren’t quite comfortable when the grateful arms of raven-haired strangers are thrown around their necks. I’m regularly surprised, and often touched, by how the contemporary refugees begin to take care of each other — becoming, in effect, rescuers themselves. And I’m learning that the most gripping side to the story of this Plateau often comes from silence — that is, not what is said about goodness, but what is shown in times of fire.”

https://aeon.co/essays/waging-peace-is-much-more-than-ending-war

12

Tamara Hervey 06.18.16 at 10:03 am

Thank you.

13

JohnT 06.18.16 at 11:59 am

This wonderfully said. I have always considered myself a moderate, looking to get along with as many people and sides as I can, and respecting every elected government. But whatever the result on Thursday, I cannot make my peace with the evils you call out. Not with irrational hatred of our neighbours, not with the stupid rejection of the 21st century, not with the misogyny, not with mindless derision of honest people who are for the most part trying to make the deals and the compromises needed to maintain a commonwealth.

They lost in 1976 and have given us no peace; should they win in 2016 we should give them none in return.

14

Lee A. Arnold 06.18.16 at 1:27 pm

I think we should refuse to accept the definition of “human nature” as an eternal immutable thing. We should start to “demonize” negative emotions themselves. Put all xenophobic homophobic Christians on a terror watchlist too, and deny them gun purchases. Put all misogynists, wifebeaters and domestic abusers on a watchlist, and deny them gun purchases. Everybody stop acting as if “human nature” is some regrettable thing which cannot be changed. Just because secular academics have rejected a spiritual being doesn’t mean they should reject waking up. Negative emotions are poison, and they are the reasons for inequality and the reasons for violence.

15

RNB 06.18.16 at 3:52 pm

A really lovely description of the daily life and aspirations and frustrations of girly swots; putting Jo Cox among them makes her life all the more singular and beautiful and her loss all the more painful and tragic.

16

Richard Cottrell 06.18.16 at 7:06 pm

The appalling murder of a Member of Parliament while on her constituency duties cannot be prized apart from the framework in which it occurred. It is part and parcel of the creeping Weimarisation of British politics hatched from the schemes of the Cameron wing of the Conservative party to cement themselves as a permanent ruling force. The referendum vaults over the heads of the so recently elected MP’s who are in a clear, cross party majority wholly opposed to the surrender of EU membership. The country has been destabilised, passions aroused that go far beyond public house ranting about foreigners, migrants, all the beasts and bogies who have haunted the British imagination since WW2, a war that we managed to win and lose at the same time.
Having served as a member of the European Parliament I readily agree there are serious issues concerning the EU that require deep and lasting reform. It is not a democratic body. It is the plaything of big business and corporatist interests. All that is true. The parliament, in which I sat for ten years, is toothless and cannot make laws. That said, the ‘peace in our time’ promissory note that Cameron brought from Brussels ranks with Chamberlain’s ‘peace in our time’ IOU signed by A. Hitler. None of these reformist requirements were even touched upon by Cameron, who does not, in any event, understand them. He simply scribbled a few things on a piece of paper and collected the right ticks in the right boxes. We have had long enough to learn that the prime minister is not a detail merchant and finds himself easily distracted by the actual chores of government. To the former PR man, politics is one long unending press release. He regards himself, unwisely, as a seasoned calculator. His real technique is the knee jerk – like the snobbish petty darts thrown at Corbyn’s wardrobe.
The assassination of Jo Cox is not a mere punctuation point, it is a waymark, for once we begin to consider the long term significance, we can start to discern the gravitational pulls and tugs which broke up the German state post WW1 at work in the UK. It is for the appropriate authorities and certainly not me, to reach the appropriate conclusions concerning the train of events that led to an elected representative being savagely butchered in broad daylight. Would this shocking affair have occurred, however, without the Pandora’s Box called the referendum’? I doubt it because there had to be stage scenery to support the drama. Weimar Germany was marked by the steady decline of trust in democratic organisations, the multiplication of violence on the streets, the flowering of extremist solutions. We have caught all of those diseases. Faragism is now a popular front. But even if UKIP decays, the vacuum will be filled. British democracy is at risk because vested interests seek to establish an entrenched political force. We are very close to a perfect storm in public life. The decay of parliamentary institutions set in with Mrs. Thatcher, and continued with Blair. There are no fragments, as such, in public life. They are all part of a whole, shared consciousness. That includes the martyrdom of Jo Cox.

Richard Cottrell

17

Stephen 06.18.16 at 8:03 pm

Maria, very eloquent, very moving. But on a few points:

You write of “violent ill-feeling … being stoked by right-wing politicians”. Sadly true. But are you sure no violent ill-feeling has been stoked by left-wing politicians? And does the present referendum make sense in terms of a left/right division? Which side is Dennis Skinner on?

I think you at least partly recognise this, when you write of “a political environment made toxic by the IRA’s mainstream apologists”. Very true, but I don’t think the apologists in Britain were other than left-wing. In Ireland, a different story.

When you mention “years of self-righteous Tory refusal to engage [with the IRA]” I think you should ask: at what date did the IRA leadership become amenable to the engagement which has led to their disarmament and abandoning of their proclaimed objectives? Was not that under the Tory government of John Major, who began the engagement? Was any engagement possible earlier, and if not was not non-engagement simply righteous?

Incidentally, as far as I can make out the lunatic murderer was a Scotsman.

18

Stephen 06.18.16 at 8:11 pm

John T@11, Lee Arnold@12: agreed, but do you not think that when John denounces “irrational hatred of our neighbours … the stupid rejection of the 21st century …misogyny”, and when Lee demands that homophobes and “misogynists, wifebeaters and domestic abusers”should be put on a watch list, you are in fact denouncing a significant proportion of the Islamic immigrants to Europe? By no means all, of course.

19

Lee A. Arnold 06.18.16 at 9:41 pm

Stephen #16, According to statistics, homophobes, wifebeaters and domestic abusers characterizes about 1/5 (one fifth) of ALL populations. Islamic immigrants do not particularly stand out.

20

Lynne 06.18.16 at 9:58 pm

All three of the monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—have their conservative wings that hold views which seem homophobic and misogynistic to the modern sensibility, but many people who hold those views do not actually abuse or discriminate against gays or women. They may believe women should follow men’s lead, for instance, without the men beating the women. However, such a belief is going to be used by men who are prone to violence and hatred of women or gays. I would be interested to know if the statistics mentioned in # 17 hold when conservative religion is considered—I would expect there to be higher incidences in those populations, even though the majority would not participate.

21

Lee A. Arnold 06.18.16 at 10:19 pm

Lynne, I don’t recall any studies that establish a general relationship between political/religious beliefs and emotional/sexual violence. I would like to know of any solid research.

22

Lynne 06.18.16 at 10:28 pm

Lee Arnold, me too.

23

Ronan(rf) 06.19.16 at 12:20 am

“God, you could grow to love, it, God-fearing, God-
chosen purist little puritan that,
for all your wiles and smiles, you are (the
dank churches, the empty streets, the shipyard silence, the tied-up swings) and
shelter your cold heart from the heat
of the world, from woman-inquisition, from the
bright eyes of children. Yes, you could
wear black, drink water, nourish a fierce zeal
with locusts and wild honey, and not
feel called upon to understand and forgive
but only to speak with a bleak
afflatus, and love the January rains when they
darken the dark doors and sink hard
into the Antrim hills, the bog meadows, the heaped
graves of your fathers. Bury that red
bandana and stick, that banjo; this is your
country, close one eye and be king.
Your people await you, their heavy washing
flaps for you in the housing estates –
a credulous people. God, you could do it, God
help you, stand on a corner stiff
with rhetoric, promising nothing under the sun.”

24

F. Foundling 06.19.16 at 2:23 am

@Lee A. Arnold 06.18.16 at 9:41 pm

>According to statistics, homophobes, wifebeaters and domestic abusers characterizes about 1/5 (one fifth) of ALL populations.

So now homophobia and domestic abuse are innate and inevitable like left-handedness, so we’ll have to just learn to live with them? This is not the first time when people sound alarmingly eager to throw the entire Enlightenment/progressive project under the bus, while also defying common sense, in order to attain the most ‘tolerant’ position imaginable. Homophobia, wife beating and child beating are matters of culture, not biology. The more backward the society/culture, the more prevalent they are. A hundred years ago, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in Western societies who *wasn’t* a homophobe and a domestic abuser by today’s standards.

@Lee A. Arnold 06.18.16 at 10:19 pm
>Lynne, I don’t recall any studies that establish a general relationship between political/religious beliefs and emotional/sexual violence. I would like to know of any solid research.

Of course every sort of violence, sexual included, is practiced more in cultures that accept or encourage it. You don’t need a study to tell you that when someone is taught that something is OK, they are more likely to do it. It doesn’t make any sense to pretend that thought and deed are somehow disconnected realms.

25

F. Foundling 06.19.16 at 2:32 am

@OP:

‘We come into our own in our thirties and forties, and accept with good grace that we won’t go all that far. We politely budge up on the small bench set aside for all the others who were locked out, thinking it sad but correct that we don’t get a special moment in sun.’

‘Maybe the girly swots win in the end just by wanting it less.’

I find this rather thought-provoking, but I will just highlight it and not comment.

@OP

‘I think we should be trying to ‘make peace’ with this, in some form that recognizes it as a fundamentally right-wing political act.’

I do think that killing a person is a fundamentally right-wing political act. Right-wing politics is about hierarchy and inequality, and the ultimate inequality is the one between a person losing their very existence and a person depriving him/her of his/her existence.

26

Val 06.19.16 at 3:37 am

I think the idea of ‘backwardness’ and the idea that a certain proportion of all societies are likely to be misogynistic and homophobic are both misleading in this context. In general the development of monotheistic, patriarchal and hierarchical societies does seem to be a fairly recent historical phenomenon, and earlier (gatherer/hunter or early farming) societies, while not necessarily less violent in general, appear to have been more egalitarian and to have worshipped both male and female gods, and some at least appear to have been relatively peaceful. I’ve put an excerpt from my thesis discussion below, hope it’s useful.

By the mid to late twentieth century, women had more voice in academic research, and some produced works exploring the historical development, from about 5000 years ago in the Central Asian and Southern European regions, of societies in which ownership and control of land, wealth, women and children was vested in men, generally within a pyramidical system in which the ruler, with the support of a small ruling class, had power over most other men (Lerner 1986, Eisler 1987) [to add: Gimbutas]. In many cases these societies also had systems of slavery involving both men and women as slaves, originally from societies defeated in war. Eisler referred to these as “dominator societies”. For the sake of simplicity, I describe this as the ‘kingdom model’ of human societies, and in this thesis I will argue that this model has been historically persistent, even within societies that are ostensibly democratic. The development of these societies was accompanied by the development of monotheistic male-dominated religions, replacing earlier religions that had both male and female figures of worship and where a ‘goddess’ figure arguably played a central role (Eisler 1987) [have other refs but not yet in my endnote library]

The particular contribution of these feminist theorists was that they historicised the development of hierarchical, unequal, patriarchal societies, rather than simply seeing them as resulting from ‘natural’ competition between men. They also explored evidence, from the same regions, about the existence of earlier societies in which men and women were more equal, relationships with the land were communal or tribal, and resources and wealth distributed more equally. There are continuing debates about the degree of patriarchy and violence in early societies (Berger 2008, Armit 2011, Nivette 2011), including Australian Indigenous societies (Whitney 1997), but most historians accept that private ownership of land and the associated wealth and resources is a relatively recent historical phenomenon.

I have quite a few ideas about the topic of this OP, but have felt recently that seriously trying to explore ideas on the history of patriarchal societies and their implications for contemporary society is a bit of a waste of time on CT. Might try to put a few further thoughts later because I know some people here are seriously interested in these ideas but the frequent dismissal of feminist analysis by some CT commenters does get a bit off-putting.

27

nick s 06.19.16 at 3:45 am

The UK has no public baseline of understanding what the EU does and doesn’t do.

It was noted today by Martin Fletcher, formerly Brussels correspondent for The Times, that it was a Mr B. Johnson, when Brussels correspondent for the Telegraph, who guffawingly stoked up the myth of the Eurocrat in his dispatches from the continent, telling tales of foreigners spending English taxpayers’ money to pass judgement on the curvature of a cucumber. That’s the myth that he is now poking at with a stick to further his own political ambitions.

Thank you, Maria. If the vote doesn’t open the gates of hell, I don’t know whether the past month needs to be forgotten quickly, or needs to be beaten into people’s memories so that next time, next time, they know when to fucking stop.

28

ZM 06.19.16 at 3:55 am

Maria,

“In the Q&A, there was a question about how the platforms we design for good are used for evil. How/should we deal with that?
My answer was a hostage to fortune. I said we needed to chill the hell out about bad things happening and understand that the Internet reflects or even amplifies what is still, basically, human nature. That’s the kind of thing you can say between bad things happening, when the horror is ebbing just a little and the next awfulness hasn’t yet occurred.”

As someone who has been cyber stalked (including multimedia as well) and there is a current police investigation into this in my State, after I had to write to the Minister for Police about it, since the local police were not happy at investigating non plain language stalking among other things, I do disagree with this.

From my point of view as someone who has been a victim of people stalking me using the internet, I think the internet is currently poorly regulated, as well as the creative industries being poorly regulated as well.

As I told the police, no one would be able to treat me how I have been treated either in public places in my town, or in businesses I worked in or entered as a customer.

After what has happened to me, I will be asking that the governments of the relevant jurisdictions reform the governance of the creative industries and the internet.

Obviously I have no interest in making some 1984 world, which is what I feel like I entered with people stalking me, but I don’t think people chilling the hell out about bad things is really the answer, since bad things happened to me! and I think the governance should be reformed, since not only have I been stalked, which is a crime, but there are no positive regulations for either the internet or creative industries that prohibit what happened to me, and I only have recourse to criminal charges of stalking etc, and now I have to attempt to find a law firm to assist me in recovering damages as well.

I think there is a lack of regulatory guidance about what appropriate and legal behaviours are to other people in both the internet and the creative industries. I know if I worked in a bakery and people treated me like this, the business and people would be investigated for workplace harassment. There are positive regulations about how to treat people in workplaces, but not in the creative industries and internet, which are also workplaces.

I have only worked out some basic ideas I will be asking the governments to consider in the reforms, but I really hate the idea of people saying to chill out about the bad things. We don’t say that about other industries, we say there should be regulations to stop workplace accidents, health and safety regulations, workplace harassment and bullying should be banned etc.

29

F. Foundling 06.19.16 at 5:10 am

@Val 06.19.16 at 3:37 am
>I think the idea of ‘backwardness’ and the idea that a certain proportion of all societies are likely to be misogynistic and homophobic are both misleading in this context. In general the development of monotheistic, patriarchal and hierarchical societies does seem to be a fairly recent historical phenomenon

You have a point in that, if you go go far enough back in time, ‘more backward’ will probably come to mean ‘less patriarchal’ – I didn’t mean to deny that either. And yet, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of contemporary humans live in societies that have already spent quite some time at the classical patriarchal, and generally authoritarian, stage and are now at more or less advanced stage of leaving it only as part of general ‘modernisation’ and ‘progress’. It was these societies I had in mind when I spoke of ‘backwardness’, with all due respect to any surviving egalitarian hunter-gatherers who might be reading the present comment.

30

Collin Street 06.19.16 at 5:18 am

Right-wing politics is about hierarchy and inequality

No. It has the result of supporting hierarchy and inequality, but it’s my position that the actual motivation is to reduce the cognitive load of dealing with different people and different desires, with “hierarchy and inequality” just emerging from that as a way for dismissing concerns of others.

Acting “below” your station isn’t a threat to hierarchy as such, quite the reverse, but it is a threat to simple classification schema; if it were purely about hierarchy then you wouldn’t have all the behaviour policing in the upper ranks. If hierarchy were the driver the permissable behaviour of the upper levels would be a proper superset of the behaviour accepted from the lower levels, but that’s pretty uniformly not what we find.

31

Val 06.19.16 at 5:53 am

@27
I suppose I was thinking you used “backward” in the way that many people use “primitive”. Even so, Carolyn Merchant in ‘The Death of Nature’ suggests that some thinkers in the Early Modern/Enlightenment period, such as Locke or Hobbes, were actually more patriarchal in their attitudes than those in pre-Modern times. I highly recommend her book if you haven’t read it.

Anyway in the last few days I have been thinking and reading about some recent attacks on female politicians. Because until recently almost all politicians were male, I guess the ‘classic’ attack is the assassination of a male politician, but recently there have been a number of attacks on female politicians.

I feel (and this is more about feelings and impressions than anything I could put forward as a theory at present) that there are some similarities in the attacks on Gabrielle Giffords, Henriette Reker and Jo Cox (and probably Anna Lindh). They were all women in their 40s or 50s, engaged in public constituency work or campaigning (except Lindh who was shopping I think), in public places. All these women were identified with humanitarian causes (Cox and Reker particularly with refugees and refugee children, Giffords with gun control), and all were attacked by men who appeared to be socially and economically marginalised and seemingly affected by a mixture of right wing ideology and mental health issues.

In recent decades there have been simultaneously social and political changes that have probably made men like that more likely to be isolated and unemployed (neoliberalism, to put it briefly) and have led to more women in public life and politics. I wonder if some of these men somehow feel that those things are connected – if women are somehow to blame for what has happened to them.

The awful thing here is that even some CT commenters seem to slip into this confusion at times – not just saying that some feminists (eg Hillary Clinton) are neoliberals, but almost talking as if feminists are to blame for the rise of neoliberalism in some way.

My historical research on patriarchy also makes me wonder if perceptions of vulnerability play into these attackers’ motivations in some way. Traditionally patriarchy suggested an idea of men as natural leaders, strong and active. Vulnerability was associated with ‘others’ – women, gays, children, the ill or elderly. It was shameful for adult men to be vulnerable. Perhaps these attackers could also have some perception of the female politicians as vulnerable, as ‘proper’ victims – being female, in public and unprotected, and associated with ‘soft’ humanitarian causes.

I don’t know, these are gloomy thoughts, but I think we need to look at the somber historical legacy of patriarchy more openly than we do.

32

ZM 06.19.16 at 5:56 am

Maria,

Regarding the rest of the post

“Peace isn’t an endgame. It isn’t even an equilibrium. (OK, maybe when it works it’s a pearl-string of contiguous Nash equilibria, each of them worked out the hard bloody way.) It’s a process that’s never finished and more people are always turning up to argue for their piece of it. I think we should be trying to ‘make peace’ with this, in some form that recognizes it as a fundamentally right-wing political act.”

I was reading something on Facebook about how this should be seen as terrorism. It was a politically motivated killing, the killer shouted something about Britain, but because the killer is white and male, and the victim is a woman as you say, the terrorism aspect is being overlooked.

If the victim was an important white MP, and the killer was a Muslim and killed him shouting something about Islam, the first thing that people would be saying was that this was a horrible act of terrorism and fundamentalism.

33

ZM 06.19.16 at 7:02 am

Ronan(rf), that Aeon article looks really interesting, I’ve added it to my reading list. Also — it’s a lovely bit of poetry you have excerpted, what is it? (I could google, but laziness)

Val,

I remember one of my friends studied religion subjects in her BA, and she did a long assignment on the Iconography of Mary in Christianity. She belonged to a High Church Anglican church, so the iconography she was used to is more similar to Catholic and Orthodox church iconography than protestantism which is more based on the Word. I think there are a number of important female devotional figures in Christianity, Mary of course being the most important. And even in Judaism you have a lot of women in the Torah, Esther, Eve, Sarah, Suzanna, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, etc. I know from theology subjects I took at ACU, that the consensus these days is also that the Jewish scripture is based upon oral accounts ordered by different groups, and the idea is that Yahweh was not originally conceived of as a monotheistic God, but as one warrior god among other gods.

I think as well that there a lot of other female figures that have always been important even in times when males dominated the public sphere. Fro example, in our built public realm here the 19th C Market Building in town has a statue of Ceres at the top, and the Art Deco Art Gallery has a facade with bas relief of a female goddess (I don’t know who?) with people from the classical age on one side, and gold miners on the other side of her http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2008/08/07/2326682.htm

While maybe stories and images of males have been prevalent, I think it is so important not to overlook all those of females, even when we are discussing the prejudice women can and do face.

34

Val 06.19.16 at 7:31 am

@ 31
ZM I always say that patriarchy was never hegemonic, there were always resistances and women were always active
But we shouldn’t let that blind us to the way it’s affected people

To say that patriarchy or slavery existed and it’s important to acknowledge that, is not the same as saying that women or slaves were ‘only’ victims. its important to say that women, or slaves, were people and agents -that they had lives and rich cultures and meanings – but it’s also important to acknowledge that oppression existed.

I’m actually analysing the damaging effect that patriarchy had on the minds of men in this case.

35

Collin Street 06.19.16 at 9:10 am

> right wing ideology and mental health issues.

Right, because there’s oh-so-many right-wingers who don’t have mental health issues that the distinction is worth drawing.

36

Lee A. Arnold 06.19.16 at 10:27 am

F. Foundling #22: “So now homophobia and domestic abuse are innate and inevitable like left-handedness, so we’ll have to just learn to live with them? This is not the first time when people sound alarmingly eager to throw the entire Enlightenment/progressive project under the bus, while also defying common sense, in order to attain the most ‘tolerant’ position imaginable.”

No, this doesn’t logically follow what I said there, at all. It is also a blindly inattentive, or else deliberately offensive, mischaracterisation of my position, which began at #12.

37

Maria 06.19.16 at 11:34 am

ZM, I’m so sorry this is happening to you. My thoughts on freedom of expression and online misogyny are pretty confused, TBH, and, I sense, in the process of changing. I have promised a piece to a journal by the end of the year on online misogyny and women politicians. I think it’s probably going to be about how the sheer quantity of hateful material available via the Internet – be it child abuse images, misogyny, various other forms of political extremism – are having a qualitative effect on our discourse. But it’s half way down a long-ish list of pieces I owe, so don’t hold your breath.

There’s a tweet going around saying women politicians are told to ignore the voluminous rape and murder threats they receive, and when one is murdered it’s a ‘shock’ and unprecedented, etc. etc. Second wave feminists had a lot to say about how freedom of expression is a non-argument and basically impossible for women under patriarchy, and the response of the authorities to your situation seems to bear that out.

When I was answering that question last week, I was thinking of radicalisation in other directions. I actually had the murder of Lee Rigby in mind, and a general train of thought that we expect an impossible perfection of the security services, at the same time as people like me condemn them for trampling on rights – it’s an impossible dilemma for them and I do feel sympathetic. We have to have some give and take and a grown-up conversation about societal risk. But that thought process wasn’t evident at all in my words there or in this OP.

By the by, I find it sickening that Lee Rigby’s murder prompted immediate moves to curtail civil liberties and this assassination of a leftwing female elected official has not merited a whisper about radicalisation by the far right – beyond the right-on circles I run in. Or indeed the radicalisation of frustrated young men by the ‘manosphere’, etc.

But anyway, thank you for sharing your experience and the insights it has afforded you. I can see how what I wrote was pretty maddening! All I can say is, I’m working on it and trying to come up with a point of view that’s coherent across all the things I’m interested in – human rights, feminism, technology, inequality. What you’ve written was helpful to me and, I hope, other readers. Good luck.

38

Maria 06.19.16 at 11:41 am

Sorry, Andrew Montin @10 was caught in the moderation queue till just now.

39

Stephen 06.19.16 at 12:13 pm

F.foundling@25: “I do think that killing a person is a fundamentally right-wing political act.”

I have serious doubts about the usefulness of the left/right political distinction, and this reinforces them. Are you saying that all the Communists and other left-wing revolutionaries who enthusiastically had rather large numbers of people killed were, in their secret hearts, right-wingers? Or is it simply a matter of left = right, right = wrong, and so anyone in favour of killing anyone else must, by your reckoning, be right-wing?

Do you know Pearse’s comment, ” We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people, but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing”? Right-winger, was he?

40

James Wimberley 06.19.16 at 1:29 pm

The three-words addressing system (what3words.com) is even better than Maria hints. Its resolution is 1-meter squares; that distinguishes between your front and back door. Much more important, it works in different languages. The entrance to the main post office in Ulan Bator will have a three-word address in Mongolian, another in English, another in Spanish, etc. Similar words (such as inflections of verbs) point to widely separated locations, so mistakes are obvious. They compromised on multilingualism for the open sea: squares there are only in English, with its enormous vocabulary.

41

Lee A. Arnold 06.19.16 at 1:36 pm

Andrew Montin #10: “our culture does nothing to help people… instead it encourages manic-depressive responses which are then exploited by political and commercial operatives…”

I think Montin’s comment is quite good, and I wish it had gotten through moderation before I wrote my comment which is now at #14.

But I want to demur on one of his points, which was also stated by other commenters here.

I think that this recurring idea that the material conditions (of culture) make a ONE-WAY causation upon the psychological and emotional deficits we see everywhere, is false. It must be two-way. It’s a chicken-and-egg thing. Why don’t we just blame both?

Some of the hunter-gatherer tribes, pastoralist tribes, and small agricultural tribes which were still extant and recorded in early 20th-century ethnography were aggressive, practiced vicinal isolation, were prejudiced, treated women as chattel, avenged wrongs by murder, etc. etc. etc. There is no rule about this; there was every possible type of tribal system.

But again, this does NOT excuse today’s prejudice and violence, as F. Foundling accused me at #24. This is an inexplicable conclusion, unless perhaps you buy into the false notion that the term “human nature” should always refer to some sort of eternal substance, so then, if it is not always good, therefore we are required to make allowances for evil. That is nonsense. We should not allow it.

We should meet basic human needs, and stop all the academic argumentation about “human nature” and whether it’s the culture or the individuals who should change. It is BOTH and we should work along both lines at the same time.

42

JohnT 06.19.16 at 2:03 pm

As to Stephen’s questions and some of the follow-ups: For my part I dislike Islamic homophobes and misogynists as quite as much as their Christian, Jewish and Pastafarian brethren. I think that a high incidence of such views amongst some immigrant groups is probably a reality and needs to be carefully considered as we think on how to integrate with them.
I also have zero problem saying Jo Cox’s killer seems to have been a right-wing terrorist. He may also have mental problems but that is true for any number of previous terrorists. It is certainly becoming apparent that if we’re going have terrorist watchlist then some devotees of neo-Nazi sites belong on , it along with devotees of Islamic State.

43

Lynne 06.19.16 at 2:17 pm

Maria, I found the OP to be eloquent, anguished, beautifully written. It left me moved, but speechless, so I didn’t reply to it right away. I would be very interested to read your journal article when it comes out. Maybe you could let us know?

44

Lynne 06.19.16 at 2:45 pm

Val, I don’t know if you had my comment in mind when you wrote #26 but I was referring to the modern society I know, not to to the historical emergence of patriarchal religions and societies.

On the topic of conservative religions, I do think it’s important to distinguish beliefs from actions, as abhorrent as some beliefs are. We don’t police thought. I have known many evangelical Christians and Catholics who believe women should follow men, and gays should be celibate, (and some who believe worse than that, that gays and non-believers will go to hell) but none of these people condone violence or hatred.

This is where I put my faith in a strong, healthy public school system.

45

Lupita 06.19.16 at 4:03 pm

F. Foundling @ 29

And yet, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of contemporary humans live in societies that have already spent quite some time at the classical patriarchal, and generally authoritarian, stage and are now at more or less advanced stage of leaving it only as part of general ‘modernisation’ and ‘progress’.

I don’t think one can place all contemporary societies on a continuum from backward, patriarchal, authoritarian to modern progressive (Western liberal democracy). Each society, culture, linguistic group, and civilization has its own path and priorities. To be blunt, Western societies are not superior or an inspiration to the rest of the world regarding feminism, human rights, and democracy. Non-Western societies, just like Western ones, just like this OP, look inwards in order to determine areas of rot and decadence, to define progress, and to chart its own unique path to a better society.

46

Dipper 06.19.16 at 4:20 pm

Maria. Everyone has a connection, and everyone has a view. Here’s mine.

I worked at a factory in Birstall as a young graduate just over twenty years ago. I had grown up in nearby Leeds but Birstall was quite a different place. There was a sense of belonging which in typical Yorkshire way was expressed as contempt for anywhere else, and quite a lot of locals seemed to be related to each other in some vague way. Despit their proximity, Birstall was certainly not Batley and definitely not like Dewsbury (for Dewsbury see see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Shannon_Matthews).

To mangle a quote from the Late Don Mosey’s biography about Geoffrey Boycott (after a particular crass encounter while on tour in New Zealand), “whilst it is usual for people from many places to think that their place of origin gives them some kind of superiority, Yorkshiremen are unique in assuming everyone else will recognise their superiority”. Well this was certainly true of many men in the factory. They were confrontational, absolutely sure of their own correctness, and your disagreement was a sign of your stupidity. Furthermore they were, in the words of the Engineering Director, a bunch of prima donnas’s. They would take offence at the slightest thing and go off and sulk.

There was also an underlying sense of violence. On one “team-building” after-shift drink one shift member attacked and hospitalised another member of the shift. There were lots of stories of drunken nights ending in fights, and whilst I was there one member of the work force was taken away by the police – he was out on licence from prison after killing his first wife and had threatened to kill his second one.

In the face of this level of intimidation from the men, two stereotypes of women appeared. Some were very meek, cowed, looking like they didn’t want to make any trouble. At the other end some were more intimidating than the men, determined not to take any nonsense or intimidation (for more on local Yorkshire culture see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita,_Sue_and_Bob_Too.).

So what to make of this shooting? To me as an attempt to influence the referendum it doesn’t make any sense. It is quite possible that the level of public outrage will swing the referendum to Remain. As a calculated act it fails. It makes more sense as the result of an out-of-control tortured ego. To me. It seems more like an attempt to silence women, and in particular to silence a successful local small women with a big voice. This is an act that has taken place in the context of a local culture of routine lesser violence against women, denigration of women, and where men expect to be dominant.

Maria @ 37 – I agree. This act, apart from the tragedy for the family involved, is an assault on the role of women in politics. Women may be discouraged from entering politics because of this. It is a highly significant act and one that needs to be responded to quite sharply. The individual appears to have had some mental problems and may have been radicalised. The state should treat this on a par with Islamist terrorism, or more so as no Islamic terrorist has murdered an elected politician.

47

Ronan(rf) 06.19.16 at 10:47 pm

Zm, it is a good article, or at least I like it. If u read it id be interested in your thoughts. This is the poem

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/oct/14/poetry.features

48

Val 06.19.16 at 11:48 pm

Lynne I wasn’t really taking issue with what you said, but wanted to make the point that these religions aren’t timeless, that ways of understanding the world can change and could evolve to something more inclusive. I agree with you (and ZM) that the picture is always more complex than the dogma might suggest. Religions evolve rather than having complete changes, and as ZM points out, while being ‘officially’ the worship of a single male God, can have many elements of a perhaps earlier tradition where female figures and multiplicity were celebrated.

Similarly I think that while Catholicism is still officially patriarchal and hierarchical, the current Pope is bringing a different, more ecological and egalitarian way of thinking. How much will it really change? Hard to say. I agree education is important – one thing, for example, that schools can and do contribute is encouraging children to experience and explore the natural world, but the current focus on academic testing (at least here, I don’t know what’s happening in Canada) is very problematic in this regard.

I’d like also to express my appreciation for Maria for writing this post. Trying to write about these events is very hard, but it gives us all the chance to talk and try to make sense of it in some way. I have found the past week depressing to be honest and am finding it hard to get motivated, but it helps to share ideas here.

49

Val 06.19.16 at 11:52 pm

Ronan, that’s a great poem. Could you give your gloss on it a bit perhaps? I don’t feel I have the context to fully understand it, even though it resonates with me.

50

Jan 06.20.16 at 9:18 am

I find it amazing that you can write an article that seems to be a plea for tolerance and understanding, while accusing democatically elected polticians who wish to leave a specific international body of being “fascists”. This is not even a Daily Mail level of argument, and your post further coarsens the already dire politcal level we have sunk to.

51

Doug K 06.20.16 at 3:00 pm

Maria, I am sorry..

as a timid swot myself I have always admired and respected girly swots – they are much tougher than me, they have to be. Thank you and all your tribe for your unseen labor over the millennia.

I try to find the stories of the sufferers and read them, to remember and celebrate their lives, not the disturbed men incited to violence by heedless demagogues.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/pulse-orlando-nightclub-shooting/victims/os-pulse-nightclub-orlando-shooting-victims-htmlstory.html

52

Lynne 06.20.16 at 8:21 pm

Val @ 48 “I wasn’t really taking issue with what you said, but wanted to make the point that these religions aren’t timeless, that ways of understanding the world can change and could evolve to something more inclusive.”
Agreed. Here’s hoping!

There is some academic testing here but the greater threat might be private religious schools. Not greater as in numbers—there are very few of them, and they are expensive. But here in Ontario, historically public funds have gone to Catholic schools as well as public. It is financially unsustainable, but no government has the guts to do anything about it, and of course other religious schools are saying If Catholics are funded, why aren’t we? It means feminists have to fight on many fronts.

53

ZM 06.21.16 at 11:22 am

Ronan(rf),

The article was great. I remember doing my History major and having similar feelings the author speaks about having after studying so much war. The examples of places where people have gone against the tide in the country or larger area and stayed peaceful in times of war was inspiring. It also made me think how fortunate I am never to have been in situation where people in my country were turning on one another in that sort of way. It must be terrifying and so heart rending. The idea of peace not being some ultimate end point, but something which happens in practice all the time, and therefore something which can be researched was really interesting as well.

“Here was a place where I could go, and — as I’ve done many times before — start looking and listening. I could see how people lived with strangers there, down to the detail. I could see how inequality and diversity were handled; how decisions were made. As in all the other research I’ve ever done, I could also look at lived faith — not what religion people claim to adhere to but how they regularly orient moral choice, with whatever means. In this community, angels singing or not, I could think about practices of resistance (to outside violence) and persistence (of the protection of strangers). I could see whether that rescue was a brilliant fluke, or something embedded in long-term social practice.

But aside from the particulars of the case of the Plateau, this is what I want to say. Peace is knowable — in gorgeous, imperfect detail — down to the level of everyday habit and choice. And what are those choices? To walk down streets with unfamiliar faces and to open your own countenance as you do; to buy baskets of fruits from someone whose accents are not your own; to allow the happy, teary scramble as your children figure out how to play with new arrivals to their school; to open the door at the threshold of your home even when storms threaten outside; to hear of the vivid suffering of others even when it weighs down the heart; to invite to the hearth, to break bread, together now. The foot crosses the threshold, the face is open, the habits — discernible to the eye — over time, become fixed (and knowable) and sure.

How is peace waged? Eye to eye.”

54

F. Foundling 06.22.16 at 2:17 am

@Collin Street 06.19.16 at 5:18 am

> it’s my position that the actual motivation is to reduce the cognitive load of dealing with different people and different desires

My impression is that it’s to to get stuff (by kissing up) and to feel better about yourself (by kicking down). This sort of human behaviour exists everywhere in practice, but right-wing ideology elevates it to a principle and model.

>Acting “below” your station isn’t a threat to hierarchy as such, quite the reverse

I don’t see how it isn’t a principal threat. Hierarchies need to be demonstrated, affirmed and maintained.

@Stephen 06.19.16 at 12:13 pm

Of course, people of all political persuasions can find it necessary or commendable to kill under specific circumstances; this doesn’t preclude the basic act’s being more harmonious with one basic orientation with respect to what human interactions should be than with another. Why I think that is so in this case, I have already stated. I don’t know much about Pearse, but he seems to have been a bit of a dreamer, or should I just say idiot, and not so easy to categorise.

55

F. Foundling 06.22.16 at 2:35 am

@Val 06.19.16 at 5:53 am

The assassins you mention were either mentally ill or troubled delinquents. My first guess would be that they targeted women for the same reason for which non-politically motivated deranged killers often seem to prefer attacking women – women are weaker. In other words, it’s about cowardice and sadism. Certainly, subconscious misogyny and patriarchal attitudes can also play a role, because they in some sense make women ‘weaker’ not only physically, but also socially.

@Lee A. Arnold 06.19.16 at 10:27 am

I hadn’t noticed your 14, but at any rate I can’t reconcile your 19 with it. If wife-beating and homophobia aren’t part of one’s nature’ and are partly or wholly the result of ‘nurture’, then they can’t possibly be expected to be equally common in all human populations regardless of the inevitable cultural differences in ‘nurture’.

56

F. Foundling 06.22.16 at 2:39 am

@Lupita 06.19.16 at 4:03 pm

It is difficult to object to this in a brief comment; I completely disagree with you partly on the facts (‘Western societies are not superior or an inspiration to the rest of the world regarding feminism, human rights, and democracy’), and partly on the value judgements (‘Each society, culture, linguistic group, and civilization has its own path’). I’ve seen enough of this ‘local uniqueness’, and it usually varies between tomfoolery and the good old stamping on a human face.

57

J-D 06.22.16 at 4:56 am

Lupita @45

‘Each society, culture, linguistic group, and civilization has its own path and priorities.’

Within each society, culture, or national grouping, there are inequalities of power: some individuals have more power and some have less. In general, the values, customs, and traditions characteristic of a society, culture, or national grouping are biassed in favour of the more powerful, partly because those who are more favoured by established values, customs, and traditions are likely to accumulate more power and partly because those who have accumulated more power have more influence over the shaping of values, customs, and traditions. To give a sort of general endorsement to the values, customs, and traditions particular to each society, culture, or national grouping, on the grounds that they are particularly characteristic of the respective society, culture, or national grouping, is in effect to take sides with the more powerful against the less powerful.

58

Lupita 06.22.16 at 2:57 pm

@ F. Foundling

I’ve seen enough of this ‘local uniqueness’, and it usually varies between tomfoolery and the good old stamping on a human face.

& @ J-D

To give a sort of general endorsement to the values, customs, and traditions particular to each society, culture, or national grouping, on the grounds that they are particularly characteristic of the respective society, culture, or national grouping, is in effect to take sides with the more powerful against the less powerful.

It is much easier to fight your local cacique (level 2) than it is to overturn the global neoliberal system (level 5). For example, the Zapatistas kidnapped the governor of Chiapas (level 3) in exchange for negotiations with the Mexican government (level 4) concerning NAFTA (level 5). The result has been that level 2 autonomy is being implemented while the Zapatista women turned their weapons on the men (level 1) to successfully outlaw alcoholic beverages while the power structures of levels 3, 4, and 5 remain unchanged to this day.

So, while it has proved impossible so far to even get the West to accept a non-European to head the IMF, at least Zapatista women are no longer being beaten up by drunks and participate in an autonomous, local government. Call it tomfoolery, but it is a victory of sorts for the least powerful of levels 1 and 2. As for levels 3, 4, and 5, at the very least, it was a humiliating experience and bad publicity to have an indigenous uprising on the very day NAFTA was implemented.

Another example of victory by the least powerful, unenlightened, illiberal fools would be the water wars of Cochabamba.

59

Lee A. Arnold 06.22.16 at 4:45 pm

F. Foundling #55: “If wife-beating and homophobia aren’t part of one’s nature’ and are partly or wholly the result of ‘nurture’, then they can’t possibly be expected to be equally common in all human populations regardless of the inevitable cultural differences in ‘nurture’.”

Sure they can.

60

J-D 06.23.16 at 6:25 am

Lupita @58

You post your comment as a response (in part) to my comment, but I can perceive no connection: in particular, it is not apparent to me that anything you’ve written conflicts with or casts doubt on anything I’ve written. Maybe I’m failing to understand what you’re getting at; or maybe I have failed to make my own point clear enough for you to understand.

61

Lupita 06.23.16 at 2:38 pm

@J-D

To paraphrase the part of what you wrote which I quoted in 58: Endorsing local ways and customs is to take the side of the powerful.

I refuted this point by describing a situation where the least powerful (Zapatista women) implemented a very illiberal and non-western rule (prohibition on alcoholic beverages) in a very undemocratic way. By endorsing their local ways, one would not be on the side of the powerful which would be the men, the West with its liberal, democratic ways, and Tequila Cuervo.

In Cochabamba, siding with the local ways of the least powerful (collecting rain water in buckets) is not an endorsement of the powerful Bechtel corporation that had privatized the clouds and the corrupt Bolivian government that had agreed to this.

Siding with local ways and customs is not siding with the powerful.

62

J-D 06.24.16 at 4:53 am

Lupita @61

I did not mean that local ways and customs should never be preferred, or that siding with local ways and customs always means siding with the powerful. I am sorry that I failed to express myself sufficiently clearly, so that you thought I meant something like that. It’s not what I wrote. Your paraphrase distorts my meaning. Your examples don’t refute the point I was actually making.

The sort of thing that amounts to siding with the powerful against the powerless is endorsing any position along the lines of:
Western ways must be right for Westerners because of their Westernness; or
Eastern ways must be right for Easterners because of their Easternness; or
Latin-American ways must be right for Latin-Americans because of their Latin-Americanness; or
Jewish ways must be right for Jews because of their Jewishness.

I’m not (here) taking any position on prohibition of alcoholic beverages, except that it’s wrong to conclude that where it’s the local way prohibition of alcoholic beverages must be right because of its localness — and, equally, that it’s wrong to conclude that where it’s the local way permission of alcoholic beverages must be right because of its localness. The general principle underlying this kind of thing amounts to generally siding with the powerful against the powerless, even though in some specific applications it may produce the opposite result. If you tell me that collecting rainwater in buckets is to be endorsed I don’t know enough to comment, but if you tell me that collecting rainwater in buckets must be endorsed for the reason (and only for the reason) that it is the local way, I know your line of reasoning is faulty even if it happens to produce the right conclusion in this particular case.

63

F. Foundling 06.24.16 at 9:44 pm

@Lupita 06.23.16 at 2:38 pm, Lupita at 06.22.16 at 2:57 pm

I’m not denying these victories, but these are indeed victories in a much less advanced, primitive context than the Western one.

If it’s true that the majority of Zapatista women were forced to ban all alcohol just to avoid being beaten, then the culture must have been highly patriarchal w.r.t. wife-beating. I assume banning alcohol was also a way to avoid the classical situation where the husband takes all the money in the household and spends it on booze (as well as playing cards etc.) – again, something that a patriarchal culture allows him to do. All of this used to be extremely usual in the popular masses in the West, too (and of course, it still occurs at the margins of society, dysfunctional families, in marginalised communities etc.), and similar solutions were proposed and, in some cases, implemented. In general, these are the problems of poverty-stricken communities with primitive living conditions, low living standards and backward, patriarchal traditions.

In Cochabamba, people were fighting not primarily for the right to keep collecting rain in buckets forever, but for affordable water prices and against privatisation of the municipal water works. There is nothing locally unique in all of this. State ownership of the water supply system is not a matter of local customs, it’s equally appropriate everywhere, and its privatisation is equally wrong everywhere, being part of the global neoliberal reaction. This is not about an alternative model of development. Furthermore, we might add that affordable water is self-evident in the West, and a modern water supply system accessible to the masses is likewise modelled on what is found in Western cities. Again, people are fighting to keep or get a semblance of what Westerners have.

Such victories don’t need to be defended as ‘local uniqueness’, they can be justified by universal leftist principles, which is the very reason why you are able to use these victories in an argument that verges on my agreeing that they are good things. On the other hand, things such as wife-beating, dictatorship or theocracy are indeed regularly defended as ‘local uniqueness’, which is why I’m deeply suspicious of such arguments.

64

F. Foundling 06.25.16 at 1:40 am

@F. Foundling 06.24.16 at 9:44 pm
>in an argument that verges on my agreeing

WTH, that should have been ‘hinges on’, not ‘verges on’. Also, the word ‘primitive’ above was hardly suitable. And I should also make the stipulation that society A can be more advanced than society B in one sphere and less so in another. Still, the main point is that I disagree with your rejection of a universal notion of progress, or good in general, and I find your replacement of this with cultural relativism not just unsatisfying, but also potentially harmful.

Comments on this entry are closed.