Stu's back, with questions about matriarchy vs. patriarchy. William Barghest has also arrived, and we feel a need to explain the basics of Lutheran Surrealist thought. Not so much as to create agreement (full agreement is never possible), but simply as a form of orientation.
Since Bachofen is the truest center of LS thought, let's dive back into the archives, and resurrect Bachofen in all his dire difficulty. Matriarchy doesn't mean rule by women. Patriarchy doesn't mean rule by men. Matriarchy (according to Bachofen) means rule of the strongest, with desire as the only principle (which it was, purely and simply, for the surrealists, or, as Marcel Duchamp put it, "eros, c'est la vie"). Bachofen said that patriarchy was the beginning of principles. Let's sketch the whole thing out (you can't leave anything to Wikipedia).
According to the Teach Yourself Greek Myth Series, there is a simple set of criteria by which one can distinguish between a matriarchy and a patriarchy.
Matriarchy
Feeling
Passive acceptance of nature
Acceptance of humanity
Unconditional love
Happiness
Unity
"The law of nature"
Patriarchy
Man-made laws
Rationality
Efforts to change, control or exploit nature
Judgment
Conditional love
Obedience
Hierarchy
The college that I went to -- Evergreen State -- tried to inculcate the matriarchal values. I felt sorry for everyone who believed in those ideas. Then, in graduate school, where I studied with a number of French-based intellectuals, those laws were again inculcated, or at least the attempt was made. However, in this case I studied mostly with one brilliant Jewish man, and I could always feel the enormous respect for the true laws of justice written on the heart just underneath his matriarchal surface. I had been raised as a Lutheran, and felt very comfortable with Judaism. Lutherans accept the ten commandments. There is an obedience to the given ruler, and to God. Although rationality is to be used, it cannot take us to the highest place, which is to faith.
I was taught at Evergreen and at the University of Washington the idea of Gaia -- the primitive Greek notion of a primal mother, or that the earth is one thing. We had Earth Day on campus, which was a laughable event where bugs were held up as moral professors. Bretonian surrealism partakes in this, esp. in its later phases -- Arcane 17 (written during WWII) in which an island off the coast of Canada is compared favorably to Notre Dame Cathedral at the heart of Paris.
The great project of French modernism was to release all repressed forces or agents and to massacre the church-sponsored state that seemed to them to have locked shut the lid of the Pandora's box of revolution. Having opened the box after the French Revolution
Race,
Gender,
Class,
Insanity,
Bad Hygiene,
Sexuality of every kind (including child molestation -- Foucault explicitly waived any and all criminal statutes with regard to sexuality -- including that of child prostitution)
All of these were to come out of the box with Nadja (in Russian the name means Hope).
Freud's idea that we would abolish the work day and instantiate permanent revels (the end of all taboos was said in Totem & Taboo to usher in a permanent holiday),
Marx's erasure of the upper class through the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as it was called in the C. Manifesto, calls as well for a permanent holiday, but this
has led to a crisis. If Man Ray painted Sade's pleasure at the burning of the Bastille, then we should also see Luther's gaze as he watches the City of God burnt to the ground by the utopian left under the Anabaptists, who begin to rape Lutheran women. The choice is between the leftist Sade, and the man of God Luther.
To unleash the id is monstrous. To unleash the lower classes so that they can decapitate the upper classes (what the Khmer Rouge did to the educated in Cambodia), is bad, bad especially as a return to a rural utopia of the matriarchal kind which invariably posits a single dynamic tyrant (communism is always already not only matriarchal, but represents a return to an even lower form, in which there is one leader, who uses the rest as if they have no subjectivity, but are only material to be sculpted into whatever he desires).
We urge instead a turn from the convulsive tearing down of the riotous revolutionaries of Sade and surrealism and communist insurrection TOWARD a return of marriage, church, and government.
It has been seventy five years since Sade was first feted by the surrealists, and now we watch as child molesters walk, divorce rates exceed 90%, police are badmouthed, and syntax is stretched.
LS is on the ramparts of the Bastille, calling for a return to order. The festival of the id that culminated in the sinful life of the Marquis de Sade (Simone de Beauvoir calls him a great moralist!) shows us the best that the left has to offer. Lutheran Surrealism cries out for order against this chaos.
The fundamental disorder wreaking havoc in our society is the problematic distinction between patriarchy and matriarchy. Teach Yourself Greek Myths, tells us of these distinctions between matriarchy and patriarchy.
Matriarchy is the law of nature, while patriarchy is based on heaven-sent laws.
Matriarchy is feeling, while patriarchy is rationalist.
Matriarchy is passive acceptance of nature, while patriarchy controls nature.
(p. 37)
Sade is not quite a matriarch in Bachofen's terms, much less is he the quintessential matriarch. Bachofen argues that there is a level even lower than matriarchy in which "the male is still dominant; every tribe is headed by its tyrannos" and that this is found in "conjunction with the extreme degradation of woman" (143). Nowhere is rule by men said however to be the essence of patriarchy. Patriarchy is law and order, the ten commandments, liberties and responsibilities, checks and balances, marriage, church, and government. Preceding matriarchy is tyranny in which individual feeling predominates, and the Sadean Minotaur is the symbol. Marriage is the rise of Hera, and the notion that pure male tyranny is broken. Symbolically, the west has made a precipitous turn, due to a willfully catastrophic misreading of Bachofen. Because above matriarchy is civil law, instantiated by the coming of the sky gods, and the notion that there are transcendent and universal principles or laws. Against mere feeling, Bachofen has posed marriage as the litmus test of a society's cultivation. The lowest societies use women as whores or as ashtrays because the materialist emphasis predominates (Bachofen specifically puts down Islamics, and says that there is a reason they worship the moon, and by moons, since it symbolically represents the night of desire, as opposed to the burning sun of high noon, when judgment is at its most keen.) ("The lowest of all orders of creation is that of Aphroditean desire" (190)). The highest societies sanction marriage because the religious emphasis predominates. Marriage represents a curtailment of bestial natural law. The way in which the weaker party is treated determines the level of society.
Bachofen sees the marriage principle as the basis for the Trojan War. Helen and Paris break her marriage vows to Menelaus, but even within her marriage to Menelaus she is not treated as an equal partner. Contrasted with this is Odysseus' marriage to Penelope. Emancipation from the "crudely sensual animal life" (143) first begins under matriarchy, but it finds its truest expression in "purely spiritual father right" (147) in which "just laws" prevail over the "material side of our human nature" (147). Odysseus has had lengthy stays among matriarchal goddess cults, and has fornicated endlessly to the point that he loses all track of time with Circe and with other goddesses, who tyrannize him, and sap all his strength, but ultimately he arises from these foul nests and returns to his wife.
The surrealist left has turned not to Odysseus but to Sade who uses women as if he wants to destroy all of creation itself. The right urges us not to seek glee in the burning of our traditions, or in the return of the satanic Sade to the canon but the left chortles fiendishly and insists, laughing at the prudery of the right. If we are Christian we look to the right (away from the id and toward the paternal superego) and we must resurrect all taboos surrounding sexuality, and maintain the phrase "complete depravity" in regards to basic human nature. Against nature we must pose the safeguards of Christian thought: walls and boundaries, police and surveillance, order and care not to sin, as we recathect the ten commandments, and the Final Judgment of God.
QUOTES FROM BACHOFEN (appendix):
"There is only one mighty lever of all civilization and that is religion" (85).
"The exclusivity of the marriage bond seems essential to the nobility and higher calling of human nature" (93).
"The initial determined resistance to the bestial state of sexual promiscuity is woman's. It is woman who artfully or forcefully puts an end to this degrading state. The staff is wrenched from the male, the woman becomes the master. This transition is inconceivable without individual marriage" (142).
"Hera makes use of the dance to check the excessive manhood of her wild son Ares. This principle of harmonious movement is contained in marriage, whose rigorous law is upheld by women... In a noteworthy passage Strabo imputes this culture-bringing benign power of woman to fear of God, which first dwelled in woman and which she implanted in the men" (144).
Quotes from Myth, Religion, and Mother Right (Princeton UP, 1967) (NB: this edition is a 200-page bowdlerization of the 1400 page original, which has never been translated into English.)
TIME AS A CRUCIAL ASPECT OF PATRIARCHY!
Surrealism found its inspiration in dreams. In dreams there is no sense of time. Time gets stuck, time stretches, as it does in Dali's watches, during dreams.
But Lutheran surrealism believes in time.
Unlike all those movements who would like to waft us back to the timeless present of the matriarchies, Lutheran Surrealism believes in patriarchy. We believe that time is of the essence: not only must we redeem ourselves in time, but that great actions are possible only through time. In this sense we are closer to the novel than to lyric poetry; and in this sense we are closer to Homer than we are to Shelley.
It is crucial that Odysseus must struggle for TWENTY YEARS to get back home to Penelope and to his MARRIAGE.
Whereas the surrealists privileged moments outside of time, moments of magical eros, we privilege the arc of duration of marriage (marriage as a patriarchal notion, according to Bachofen).
In Breton's great novel Nadja, or in Soupault's Last Nights of Paris (translated by matriarchal thinker William Carlos Williams, who endlessly befouled his own marriage with haetarism), we see the two whoremonger surrealists out of their heads over prostitutes. By the end of the novels the fixation they have is over, and the few erotic contacts are done. They actually celebrate this whoremongering and these ephemeral contacts when they should be ashamed of them!
Matriarchy is about hedonism, pure and simple. And hedonism leads to use and abuse of the weak (Nadja is put in an insane asylum at the end of Breton's novel, and the narrator never visits her).
Lutheran surrealism is about principles, and principles lead to protection of the weak with laws and contracts, such as the marriage contract. The ultimate weak are the children. (What happened to Nadja's child?) We like the idea that children have parents who are legally bound to protect them. And we like to think about lyric poetry or narrative art as one that is not so much about a chance interaction between two people who never see one another again, but rather the deep contractual space between people who are thoroughly engaged with one another for generations. This latter has not been a big topic for lyrical poetry for at least a few centuries.
We try to elucidate fulcrum moments where character is formed. Character means the choice between good and evil. Choosing something good is evidence of good character. Bad is bad character.
In a larger sense, we think that those poets who celebrate ephemeral encounters are themselves choosing evil over good. Anything of brief duration is automatically evil. We believe that photography of bums met on the street is an evil practice, just as evil as giving them money, because it implies a brief glancing acquaintance rather than sustained community. Bums are bums (generally) because they haven't accepted their role in time, but have instead sought oblivion through wine or drugs.
To be in time together brings out all the sin & mischief of which a person is capable. We get to know one another in a deeper sense through time. It is only through time that character can be illuminated. The surrealist novels that celebrated the ephemeral had no plot because they also had no character, and thus they also had no sense of a revelation of character. Our novels are moving in another direction. Not toward matriarchy, and the dumbness of the lyrical moment outside of time, but toward patriarchy, and the intelligent fulcrum inside of time, while waiting for eternity.
We are interested in those institutions that rise above the brief hedonistic contract of the hippies and the surrealists. We are interested in churches, schools, hospitals, and government agencies, in longstanding businesses and railroads and highways. Anything that is meant to last more than one generation. If timelessness and love without consequences is important to matriarchies, we are interested in restraint of desire, and in the ways in which people hold back in order to think about the long-term repercussions of our actions on the patriarchal institutions that hold together life in the Christian west. Anything that lasts one generation or less (by default) is evil. Ultimately, only eternity has any value.
62 comments:
Kirby,
Matriarchy doesn't mean rule by women. Patriarchy doesn't mean rule by men. Matriarchy (according to Bachofen) means rule of the strongest, with desire as the only principle (which it was, purely and simply, for the surrealists, or, as Marcel Duchamp put it, "eros, c'est la vie"). Bachofen said that patriarchy was the beginning of principles.
OK. Stop right here. According to this, Bachofen, and you with him, are (1) going to define matriarchy and patriarchy to mean things other than what they are generally understood to mean, (2) you're going to declare patriarchy wins, given your peculiar definitions, and then (3) revert to the original definitions, more or less, and claiming that the win has meaning there. This is obviously unsound.
And let me argue that there is something very un-Lutheran about your approach to these questions, in that you typically identify the extreme points on some axis, and then jump on one of the extremes, whereas Luther generally argued for maintaining an informed tension. Let's take the specific case of the environment, with the poles of acceptance (here imagined along the lines of Na'vi theology from Avatar) with efforts to control or exploit nature (here imagined along the lines of Saruman's furnaces and mines from Lord of the Rings, or perhaps BP's more recent contributions to gulf ecology). You suggest here, in opposition to yourself as represented in recent threads, that the patriarchal side of exploitation is the side of principle. No.
No one in their right minds would argue that we should go back to an era of outhouses and untested, untreated water sources. Our efforts to manipulate the environment have caused great good, but also great evil. In the choice between fatalism, and unlimited exploitation of the world to suit both our needs and our fancies, we need to come down on the side of bending it, but not breaking it, and of being willing to part with a few fancies, so that others might have their needs satisfied. Our needs are in tension with the needs of our successors, and God didn't create the world for this generation alone.
Such arguments can be made up and down the line, mutatis mutandis.
Stu, read the whole post. Bachofen set the terms for those definitions, and they remain in force inside of Mythological Studies.
Gender mavens changed the definitions, and they came later.
But if you want the terms to make ANY sense in Bachofen's terms, you have to go back to Bachofen's definitions.
He was writing in the 1860s.
Everything that's come in via the gender mavens has been in the last fifty years.
But we're talking about Bachofen, not gender studies.
I went to a lot of trouble to get you the definitions in Bachofen's terms. A lot of people have tried to bury Bachofen permanently under a barrage of redefinitions, and simplifications, reducing a beautiful metaphysical system to very simple physical definitions.
Try to strain your brain and deal with the post. Your brain will scramble a bit, but I think you can handle it.
Bachofen was a Calvinist, and not a Lutheran. Try to get back to Bachofen for a minute.
If we can't get his terms right, then we can't talk about his work.
I've read his 1400 page book several times. It's magnificent. Feminists and Marxists have tried many times to bury it, and have largely succeeded, but they ruin everything they touch as they make it amenable to their simplistic agenda.
If we go back a hundred and fifty years to Bachofen himself, we find the terms to be quite different than how they've been bowdlerized today.
I might be one of the few to insist that Bachofen's WIKI definition is completely inaccurate. However, it is.
Be patient, and read my post. It's a very short piece compared to the Bachofen tome, but I think I have restored him to his original parameters.
Unfortunately, few will recognize this, because you have to read German or French to read the original. The American translation is already a bowdlerize overseen by a cabal of feminists in the 1960s.
Kirby,
Stu, read the whole post. Bachofen set the terms for those definitions, and they remain in force inside of Mythological Studies.
Gender mavens changed the definitions, and they came later.
With respect, you're blowing smoke. Let me reference the OED.
The term patriarchy has cites going back to 1561 (in a translation of Calvin's work), and in the generally accepted meaning of patrilineal descent and male rule within households going back to Bacon in 1626.
Wiki (Matriarchy) points out that matriarchy is a parallel coinage to patriarchy, and that it effectively supplanted the earlier term gynaecocracy, with uses by Aristotle and Plutarch, and 17th century uses in that form. Again, this checks out with OED, which has cites from 1612 and on, with essentially the modern meaning of domestic rule by women.
So I don't think you can blame the gender studies movements, and I'm deeply skeptical of your claim that gender studies as an independently recognized academic discipline goes back 50 years. For crying out loud, the copyright on Shulameth Firestone's Dialectic of Sex is 1970, and surely this predates gender/womens studies per se.
And certainly, I've encountered the terms in their common meaning in my college anthropology course, which means the Spring of '77, IIRC. I'm not saying that the anthropology community doesn't have liberal social norms (after all, we read Chagnon at face value in those days), but I am saying that those norms are quite different from gender/womens' studies norms, and actually more than a bit resistant to them.
I might be one of the few to insist that Bachofen's WIKI definition is completely inaccurate. However, it is.
I tried to allow for that possibility in my initial comment. The Bachofen Wiki article is odd. Short, telegraphic. More like a college essay than the typical Wiki article. In this case, there's reason to give Wiki less deference than usual, even a priori.
I do have the sense that there are ways we can engage more fruitfully on the question here, but I'm skeptical of your essay as a starting point, and also of the inconsistently enforced 4096 character limit on postings.
If you want a better starting place, tear away the political posturing, and think more deeply about the real issues.
We want the benefits of a well-ordered society. But are we willing to be lawful ourselves? Laws either limit our behavior, or they're pointless. This is so, whether the laws come from one God, one man, or our own quaint legislative process. If you think we're capable of obeying the law, then you've missed the whole point about Christ dying for us.
We want the benefits of faithful relationships. But are we willing to be faithful ourselves? Clearly there's a lot of screwing around, and a lot of betrayal, and political party or opinion has little to do with it.
We want justice. But mostly, we think that means vengance on those who have done us harm, and mercy on ourselves. Are we willing to be merciful to those who injure us? Are we willing exact reparation from ourselves for the injuries we do to others? We want to be love, but are we willing to be loved? We want God to be generous with us. But are we willing to be generous with God?
EVERYTHING IN MYTH STUDIES about matriarchal societies that supposedly pre-exist patriarchal societies stems from Bachofen.
Even feminists agree on this.
They just disagree about whether he approved of them.
They, largely, approve of them.
Bachofen thought they were disgusting.
In essence, Bachofen not only built the Goodship Lollip of the matriarchal society, but he also torpedoed it.
The words pre-exist, but you have to think about the concepts. I've studied this topic for years and years.
It's hard to shoehorn into a post what I know about it.
However, thank you for your initial reading.
The thing is that Bachofen torpedoes the Goodship Lollipop.
Feminists (many of whom have not been able to read the German or the French) have battened on the bowdlerized version of Bachofen developed by a feminist cabal in order to get the Goodship Lollipop back afloat, so that "scholars" like Marja Gimbutas could become cheerleaders for peaceful matriarchies.
While the pottery does still exist with vagina symbolizations, what they point to is quite different than what Gimbutas wished.
She posits that war began with patriarchies, and that the preexisting matriarchies were wonderfully harmonious and peaceful.
Do you think that that accords with the archeological record?
She claims these societies existed somewhere up around Siberia.
And that they were brought to an end by the sky gods.
This is one of the greatest frauds perpetrated in academia.
All you have to do is read Bachofen and you realize that the whole thing is a fraud. So, Bachofen has been carefully kept from the American public.
How long can this continue?
A peaceful and harmonious prehistoric existence where women and love ruled the roost?
Find the archeological substrata. In fact it's just what Bachofen said it was: matriarchy meant that male tyrants held women in common.
Marriage was the beginning of symmetry based not on physical strength but on principles.
Patriarchy (sky gods) were actually the beginning of women's equality.
This about the theory, then think about what you know of the facts, and proceed accordingly.
Kirby,
EVERYTHING IN MYTH STUDIES about matriarchal societies that supposedly pre-exist patriarchal societies stems from Bachofen.
Amazons? I believe Heroditus predated Bachofen :-). Did the Amazons actually exist? There a lot in Heroditus of which skepticism is warranted, and Amazons clearly among them. But even if the Amazons were mythic, clearly people thought about the possibility of societies dominated by women, and absent the particular lens of our era, recreated them as female Spartans.
But I do take your point. Were there any real matriarchal societies? There is some positive evidence, e.g., in the matrilineal descent of the Jews. The use of the term gynaecocracy by Aristotle and Plutarch. I'd like to know what they were talking about. I would not count polyandrous societies. And certainly there have been matriarchal subcultures, ranging from temple priestesses to Army wives. But have there been any full-blown matriarchal societies in the dominant sense of the word? None that come to mind.
But there certainly have been societies in which men and women have been viewed as equally worthy, and equally important, notably the early eastern (Syria, Asia Minor) Christian Churches. Female queens as leaders of societies on an occasional basis are well attested, from Hatsheput to Solomon's queen of Shebah,
let alone Elizabeth, Victoria, et. al. more recently.
But even if the point is granted that truely matriarchal societies exist only in myth and at the margins, I don't see how this relates to your argument as a whole.
She (Gimbutas) posits that war began with patriarchies, and that the preexisting matriarchies were wonderfully harmonious and peaceful.
Do you think that that accords with the archeological record?
I don't see much evidence for a harmonious period in human existence. If things are going well, it's a good bet that we'll reproduce our way into scarcity. I also tend to think that a vision that a society dominated by women (i.e., one that supresses men) will somehow be more just or more peaceable to be ridiculous on the face of it. Oppression requires injustice, and sustaining injustice requires force or coercion.
Marriage was the beginning of symmetry based not on physical strength but on principles.
The history of marriage goes back to the beginning of the historical record. Some of the earliest writings we have are marriage contracts. I'm skeptical of speculation regarding the sexual behavior of humans in some pre-pair-bonding world. Absent evidence to the contrary, that seems like a mythical world.
Bachofen is sometimes dismissed (with Marx) as a "unilinear evolutionist." Where Marx sees everything through class, Bachofen sees marriage as the ultimate litmus test of a society.
He sees Homer's poem (both halves) as men and women struggling over rights, with the marital bed as the central litmus test. I don't know how well the poem is known here.
Agamemnon (king of the Greeks) does something quite horrific with his daughter -- he tells her it's her marriage day, and says get on your best dress (she's 12 or so) and then he sacrifices her for a favorable wind to sail to Troy.
His wife kills him when he comes home for this.
Bachofen gets at very interesting material.
Unlike Marx's class, marriage really is the center of society. It's considered in Christian thought to be the only superlapsarian order.
It's not clear to me where to go with all this. But thank you for conceding a few points.
I have to run, but am thinking about where to push this big mess next. Maybe someone else will have an idea?
There is the real physicality of men and women, and there is the mythical dimension of sky and earth.
the lead story tonite on NBC was the startling scientific evidence that reports that girls age 7 and 8 are beginning their puberty phase of life and this is really startling scientists were speaking earnestly about this as a crisis of food or a crisis of environment or a crisis of water
but what is it
is it an anomoly
i think all femininity is compromised by synthetic hormones
the matriarchs are beefing up for war
i can feel it
women's liberation:
out of the cage
into the wasteland
maybe it's just an extension of
servility
there is so little freedom to go around
there are only our efforts and then there's the blues
go ahead kirby
resurrect that dude bachofen
i think he's a real voice for our day
i'm with you
did i read the word
gynaoecocracy somewhere
these are disturbing times
i wonder if the poets are up to it
i guess
mother church
no longer works
despite Bs nod to
the Blessed Virgin
was he a catholic guy
no
a calvinist i bet
there's a beautiful nigerian pop star who sings sultry love ballads
by the name of SADE
but you mean
de SADE
why did people come around to such demented approaches to sexual morality when they left Rome
maybe the albigensians never died out
john paul 2 spoke of family as a sacrament
most of the wisdom necessary to face the world can be learned in a healthy family..but let's be real
families beat us up sometimes too
even the best of families
the matriarchal push of the present day is fueled by synthetic chemicals...this should give us more pause
maybe it will give us more paws
more and more extreme means of mind control will be necessary to keep USA churning away
since dangling away from sound christian epistemology the various idealist movements have proven themselves embarrassing at best
the living body of christ has been kicked in the nuts most recently...but hey not the first time..listen to thsoe christians sing louder and louder
we do well to consider
the divine eros
hot town summer in the city
back o my neck feelin o so gritty
all manner of thing shall be well
pax woebegonum
jh
"I'm skeptical of speculation regarding the sexual behavior of humans in some pre-pair-bonding world. Absent evidence to the contrary, that seems like a mythical world."
You may want to check out this
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/06/foragers.html
for something a little less mythical.
JH, I read in Time Magazine that even smaller Mexican cartels are making 40 billion a year selling methamphetamines to Yankees.
The synthetic aspect of America is indeed an enormous problem.
I thought alcohol was bad enough.
I do tinct, but that's my only access to alcohol, and even that is a guilty pleasure.
Stu raised interesting questions. Barghest had an amazing set of questions but I don't know where it went. I shall try to post it again.
Barghest put this on the Marianne Moore Notes on Prayer, but I think it belongs here, where it can be more readily seen. Perhaps the Bachofen controversy will create a new axis.
Am I the only one who has actually read Bachofen? You can get the Princeton edition cheap at Amazon. The introduction by Joseph Campbell isn't too terrible.
"Of human action but not human design" Adam Ferguson but popularized by Fred Hayek.
"This LOGOS holds always but humans always prove unable to understand it, both before hearing it and when they have first heard it. For though all things come to be in accordance with this LOGOS, humans are like the inexperienced when they experience such words and deeds as I set out, distinguishing each in accordance with its nature and saying how it is. But other people fail to notice what they do when awake, just as they forget what they do while asleep."
Heraclitus via Diels Kranz
Is the logos simply the emergent order in evolutionary biology and classical economics? Is God's Plan (I'm not sure whether it matters that it be thought of as eternal or not) the result of evolution or human economic activity? I had never understood how evolution and theistic creation could be compatible, but this is plausible to me.
How is the logos related to the eunomia (good social/political order)? How does the political order emerge and why should it be good?
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/08/roberts_on_the_1.html
Here Russ Roberts discusses emergent order with A. Kling (with an oddly religious reverence)
The Logos sounds a bit like the Tao to me.
compare
"This LOGOS holds always but humans always prove unable to understand it"
"The Way that can be told of is not an unvarying way;
They seem like reflections of each other. The logos is unvarying but you can't understand it. If you are told the way, it is not the unvarying way.
And compare,
"For though all things come to be in accordance with this LOGOS, humans are like the inexperienced when they experience such words and deeds as I set out, distinguishing each in accordance with its nature and saying how it is. "
"It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;
The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind."
Both seem involved in generating the world. The logos seems to be the laws under which generation occurs, whereas the tao is more of a source, but in both cases the act of trying to understand generates distinctions, which are somehow not fully true.
Now to Luther's translation.
"Im Anfang war das Wort, und das Wort war bei Gott, und Gott war das Wort.
Dasselbe war im Anfang bei Gott
Alle Dinge sind durch dasselbe gemacht, und ohne dasselbe ist nichts gemacht, was gemacht ist"
Dasselbe is a pronoun here referring to God? (mein Deutsch is schwach)
Is the Tao or the Logos patriarchal, matriarchal or neither? And what does John mean by saying that God was the Logos?
Stu, I haven't read Herodotus, except perhaps fragments.
The Greeks wrote extensively about the gods on Mt. Olympus, as well as Amazons, etc.
Bachofen thought they were referring to pre-historical matriarchal societies in certain instances.
I would not say that the gods and goddesses on Mt. Olympus existed.
Or that Aphrodite slept with Apollo.
But Bachofen see the ways in which the Greeks wrote about these issues to be tantamount to a gender discussion, and he argues that the female goddesses were of various kinds.
Some believed only in sexual love, and then some societies preferred these. Paris, for instance, of Troy, chooses Aphrodite when he is asked whether Athena (Odysseus' choice, who represents strategy) or Hera (who represents faithful marriage partner) or Aphrodite were to be chosen (Aphrodite represents hot love).
Bachofen argues that those groups that choose hot love are CALLED matriarchies, but they are male-dominated (like the Rolling Stones, or biker gangs).
Those who put marriage first tend to be like the 50s suburbs.
Strategy (Athena) tend to be wily survivors like Odysseus.
I'm trying to get 1400 pages into a blog comment.
Women can also choose hot love (Paris Hilton's highest praise is seeming, 'It's hot.')
Of course, that may be a marketing strategy on her part!
Lindsay Lohan versus a more long-term thinker among women?
Say, Condoleeza Rice.
In general, societies tend to put one value above another, and the values are REPRESENTED by gods and or goddesses.
William,
An interesting article. But the essential point (the existence of polygamy, the frequency of pre-marital sex and extramarital affairs) doesn't require looking at foragers. Your point, if I understanding it correctly, is that these well-known "features" of human sexual behavior are at odds with pure pair-bonding, as indeed are any kind of homosexual activity, and the much less frequent behavior of polyandry. Granted.
But I don't think the article you cite argues at all for the kind of society that Bachofen was positing, in which groups of men held groups of women "in common," which I took to combine the worst features of a gender-based caste system with socially sanctioned gang rape. There is no doubt that micro-societies exist in which this is indeed the case (indeed, one need look no further than certain gangs), but I am deeply skeptical that this ever represented a dominant pattern in human social organization. The evolutionary obstacle is that all such societies do a terrible job of raising kids, and so cannot sustain themselves absent self-sustaining "prey" populations, which must necessarily be organized differently.
My take on this is that pair-bonding is the first-order term in describing human sexual behavior, by which I mean that it is both succinct, and it describes most sexual behavior. The evolutionarily relevant driver here is that children raised by two parents are much more likely to reach reproductive age than children raised by only one parent. Raising kids is notoriously expensive for humans, because we are such a neotenous species. But there are two important co-existing second-order effects: sexual opportunism -- elegantly captured by a cocktail napkin I saw a few days ago, depicting a Bacall-ish women with the caption, "I used to think I was a slut, but then I realised that I was just acting like a man"; and sexual initiation and learning, which often happens before pair-bonding. Neoteny figures heavily in the later. It is these second-order effects that make sexuality so difficult and potentially dangerous for humans.
William, I'm only able to deal with your final question, but hope someone else will deal with the other stuff. I don't think we have any Taoists here unless it would be JH who has some knowledge of that stuff.
John is often thought to be the most Greek of the Gospel Writers.
But there is also an argument that you see now and then that Logos for him is active as in Hebrew. Somehow Hebrew nouns also have an active component. An ex-pastor explained that to me once, but because I don't know either Greek or Hebrew, I was unable to follow the logic. I only note that that was what he said, or what I think he said.
In other words, when Heraclitus talks about LOGOS, or when Heidegger talks about LOGOS, it isn't the same thing as when John says in the beginning was Logos.
I DO THINK THAT BACHOFEN would think that LOGOS was patriarchal, but not necessarily male.
This is quite confusing nevertheless because in Bachofen's day aside from a few bizarre anomalies like QE1, or Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary, we didn't have a lot of female authority figures in 1860.
So there is a real separation of genders, and the powers that run them.
Men are more likely to rape women than vice versa.
Men are more likely to bully women for sexual favors than vice versa.
But women can emotionally bully men.
And they can use gossip and other tricks, lies, and deceit, to destroy men.
But Bachofen doesn't care about that level of things. What he's tracing is merely the way in which symbolization of male and female denotes a society's adherance to a patriarchy or a matriarchy.
Bachofen says that marriage is the key to patriarchy, and that women initiate this transition. It's a kind of union of women, saying, marry me, or no kids, but there is also a new offer of a kind: if you marry me, you'll know your kids are yours.
Aphroditean societies (which may or may not have existed, but which are something like Club Culture in inner cities today) offer hot sex, hot dancing, anonymous sex, but you don't know whose kids are whose.
The Greeks didn't really have the one to one marital situation that became prevalent in Christian society. It was starting to happen in Rome, Bachofen says.
Bachofen wasn't attached to a university, but he had friends who were. He was a judge in Basel.
He seemed to have alot of free time to speculate and do research, but he's using his intuition rather than factual study much of the time. When he does use source material, he uses myth and stories as opposed to scholarship on the actual reality of prehistorical societies.
The levels of reality are hard to keep separate.
Somehow, Brett's note on the reality of girlish bullying started all this back up.
But again, Bachofen wouldn't have paid attention to actual events in his actual surroundings. Or if he did, it wasn't his scholarly interest.
He was creating a values-hierarchy of how mythology of various societies led to higher (patriarchal) and lower (matriarchal) societies.
What's so stunning about it, is that it also helps us to understand the surrealist-Lutheran split.
This is why it became so central to me.
Kirby
Is the Tao or the Logos patriarchal, matriarchal or neither?
Neither. And I wouldn't say that they're the same concept.
The concept of Logos originated with the Greeks, who could not look to their gods for the source of moral law. So logos for them became a kind of meta-god, not necessarily conscious in and of itself, but a fundamental, natural, moral law which pre-existed and was superior to their gods.
The Tao, on the other hand, means "the way." This, not coincidentally, was how Jesus described his movement. The emphasis was on how you lived, how you expended your life. This makes contact with the notion of moral law, but only by radically internalizing it.
But neither is either patriarchal nor matriarchal, at least by the definitions that seem reasonable to me.
And what does John mean by saying that God was the Logos?
John is the latest, and most theologically developed of the Gospels. It is less concerned with providing a witness of Jesus in life, than it is in explaining the significance of Jesus as Son of God. And John was written long after the explusion of Christians from the synagogues, and long after the destruction of the Temple and onset of the Jewish disaspora. In short, John was written to Christians immersed in a gentile, rather than a Jewish, context.
John's identification of the Word (logos) with God, and of Jesus as the Word made flesh, is a strikingly elegant bit of theological eminent domain, as John not only equates Jesus with God, but he also appropriates to both the contemporary Greek philosophical concept of Logos as the foundation of moral law, superior to and pre-existing their gods.
Stu, the closest thing I can think of to what Bachofen would have been describing is not groups of men holding women in common but rather one male tyrant.
Think of Charles Manson.
That's more or less what he's describing.
Deer and many other large mammals work on this principle.
I didn't want to butt in, but just to clarify. Not groups of men. But one man.
Agamemnon among the Greeks is more or less like this. He takes a woman away from Achilles at one point. It's not clear if he sleeps with her (he claims later on that he hasn't done that, but he needs Achilles to get back into the fight since Hector is beginning to turn the tide against the Greeks without Achilles' hectoring Hector).
Stu,
I didn't bring up Robin Hanson in order to support the idea that there were once matriarcal societies as Bachofen according to Kirby describes,(although I completely didn't make that clear), only that some things are known about sexual relations in pre-agricultural societies, so we don't have to just speculate.
"This is quite confusing nevertheless because in Bachofen's day aside from a few bizarre anomalies like QE1, or Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary, we didn't have a lot of female authority figures in 1860."
Don't forget Catherine the Great and Maria Theresa.
y'all are like a gaggle of Mocking Birds (or Magpies)
roosting on a telephone line frying your brains in the Sun
waiting
for some boddhi to call
chirpping, chirpping, chirpping:
QUA! QUA! QUA!
(not even so much as a qua non qua)
try Gertrude Levy's THE GATE OF HORN
(this work 40 years PRIOR to Marija Gimbutas')
there is Claude Levi-Strauss.... too
and regarding "surrealism"
get thee to Louis Aragon's 1920: The Adventures of Telemachus
"the essential point (the existence of polygamy, the frequency of pre-marital sex and extramarital affairs) doesn't require looking at foragers."
Not only do these things exist in forager societies but polygamy in particular is an order of magnitude more common, certainly compared to traditional farming societies.
"Polygamy is always allowed and usually socially preferred. Co-wives either live together or one lives with a husband while the rest live in entirely different bands. On average, about 35% of men have more than one wife, and 50% of women are in a polygamous marriage (vs. 3% and 7% in modern societies).
People are expected to have premarital sex, which is usually common. Extramarital sex is also usually common, though it is usually not acceptable for women. Adults talk about sex openly. While wife-beating exists, divorce is easy. Boys and girls are equally preferred, and women are considered equals of men."
But as you say one does not get a picture of tyranny over women by gangs of men or an individual man.
Robin Hanson thinks that since we lived as foragers for so long many of our instincts lead towards those norms. Farmers replaced them with the traditional norms we are familiar with, but after becomming fantastically wealthy in the last 150 years, we are returning to some of the forager norms.
Even in Lutheran societies.
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/07/what-defines-the-swedish-soul.html
Stu is using patriarchy and matriarchy as they are generally used today, rather than how Bachofen used them when he says that the Christian logos is neither the one nor the other. Of course, in Bachofen's sense, it is entirely patriarchal.
Stu's use of the term has to do with whether women can be ordained, which is a separate question, but one that forces its way into the Bachofen framework via the gender maenads.
Let me try to go back to the hippies, or to Hell's Angels, or to any group of party boys.
Let's say you are talking to a CEO, even, someone who you know fairly well, and he says in a manly voice, "If it doesn't get me either pussy or paydirt, I don't want anything to do with it."
All of us have heard someone say something like that. Women can have similar values (who's the woman on the E channel whose name starts with a C and has some kind of talk show that features a midget as her Ed McMahon?).
Ok, now let's say that "pussy" to put it bluntly is a person's main value. So let's say they put a picture of that up on the wall.
That's matriarchy, in Bachofen's sense. It is a material and earthly value. It is about power, about here and now, about seize the day, about live for the moment, and so on. So the "pussy" is symbolic of lower order desires.
Fast forward to the 1960s and you have all kinds of hippies with long hair. Slowly the movement loses any kind of moral bearings. You get orgies. You get drug use. You get Manson, for sure, but you get lots of other men who are living for very temporary flings (Easy Rider, where they visit whores in New Orleans). This is supercool, now.
But it's also matriarchy in Bachofen's sense.
Now you take women who are getting all upset about the toll this is having on them. Some of them are of course grooving and playing along, but there are also abortions, fatherlessness, and a general sense they are getting a raw deal. They begin to get mad. They burn bras. They turn against dad. Then a few feminist scholars start to posit that the "pussy on the wall" of the prehistorical pottery shards represented a matriarchal society, and then these women can't read German, so they decide that Bachofen was either wrong or had it backwards (as Marx's friend Engels alleges) and that these prehistorical societies were really all about sharing and peace, and they didn't have all the hang-ups we have today, and sex was free, and make love not war, man. And that was the new twist on matriarchy, but it was actually becoming the old matriarchy, which just meant some creep whose only value was pussy. Think: Manson. Or think the creep who starts his Christian community in Kentucky called simply The Farm.
Mormon polygamy is a kind of throwback to matriarchy.
It doesn't mean that women are in charge. In praxis, it is VERY MUCH the opposite. It means the concept of "pussy" is in charge, but it doesn't mean that women are in charge. Far from it!
Meanwhile, you have Christ. Now, it's true, men are his disciples. And there is this sense that only men can be leaders. But women do start to have rights.
but it's confusing for many reasons. One is that these men appear to be bachelors. And the Christian monks are bachelors (Catholic monks are still bachelors). But their values are not earth-bound. Their values are transcendent. They posit values and principles of another world, another kind of values altogether. They posit universal justice, and love which is NOT sexual, as the highest value (highest!).
That's patriarchy to Bachofen. So, in Bachofen's sense, the Johanine value is VERY PATRIARCHAL when he talks about LOGOS (which has a lot of different interpretations -- the most interesting tears it out of the Greek context and puts it back into a Jewish context).
If matriarchal values can be summarized as "pussy" you'd think I'd be able to come up with such a simple moniker for the transcendent values of the patriarchy. It's not "dick." Far from it.
It's "phallus," this time in the Lacanian sense of a ruler. Of course, women can be adequate rulers. They have brains, and have judgment. They CAN BE decent Supreme Court Justices. They can be excellent professors, teachers, and so on. They can be good mothers. But if they are, then, in Bachofen's terms, they are patriarchal thinkers.
In neither case do the actual private organs of a person mean what we think they mean in Bachofen's terminology.
They are symbolic.
This is confusing to us because of the ways in which our world is actually divided into gender warriors and chauvinists (of both genders).
But Bachofen clarifies these issues.
Christ's disciples are patriarchal. They all believe in a higher truth than mere pussy.
But around them they keep running into men who only believe in power. Herod is like this. And Salome uses her sexual power to get John the Baptist's head lopped off.
And Pilate, and Rome in general, do not have very sophisticated ideas of transcendent truth. They are working on it, but you get fellows like Caligula who will walk into wedding parties and rape the bride in front of the entire society.
They will sodomize her.
This is not patriarchy in Bachofen's sense, but matriarchy: rule of the powerful whose ONLY criterion is their own desire, or whim.
Christianity posits the end of that period of matriarchy, and the beginning of the rise of matriarchy. But when the hippies return to orgies, or when the Catholic church priests rape children, it is the return of matriarchy in Bachofen's sense, and certainly NOT the fault of the patriarchy (although it is often the fault of men).
But men ARE liable to have "pussy" or its equivalent as their only criterion. Women are also liable to put power and personal wish for omnipotence above transcendent truth, and playing fair.
When Moses gets handed the Ten Commandments it comes to him on top of a mountain, from a sky god. It's the beginning of principles that are transcendent, as they are arrayed against the muddy principles of Egypt where the Jews had been in captivity under the Pharoahs.
When we go into Afghanistan it is not a patriarchy we are fighting, even though it's all men, and they have beards. It's a matriarchy. It is totally corrupt. The men don't have any higher sense than that there is power.
Even hamid Karzai is basically corrupt and puts his own family first.
This is matriarchal.
What is needed are principles.
This is why I keep saying that the Democrats have no principles. they put their own power first. They want to take over institutions mostly in order to drive their own agenda through having to do with their own power, and the fulfillment of their desires.
They claim that this is true of the Republicans, but only because they can't imagine that there is another group who is thinking about principles.
Being matriarchal is difficult to resist, because we are mud, and gravity pulls us back to our desires. Patriarchy is something difficult to attain. It requires prayer, and focus, and love for God, and constant thinking about higher things.
Most can't do this. But I think all of us can do it (except J, which is why I banned him).
In the tenth paragraph of the last long post, I meant to write that Christ was the beginning of the rise of PATRIARCHY (in Bachofen's sense).
In fact, it had been in progress since the handing of the ten commandments to Moses (at least).
No other civilization has done as good a job as the Jews in thinking about patriarchy. Jesus is Jewish. So we have to listen to the Jewish testament and think a lot about what they are saying.
And we have to watch out for secretive sneaky little matriarchs who claim for instance that the Sermon on the Mount was the whole ballgame, and that if love is the answer, then let's have an orgy.
Because that's matriarchy all over again.
William,
I didn't bring up Robin Hanson in order to support the idea that there were once matriarcal societies as Bachofen according to Kirby describes,(although I completely didn't make that clear), only that some things are known about sexual relations in pre-agricultural societies, so we don't have to just speculate.
Let me gently dispute that. Hanson's data, if I understand correctly, refers to
modern foraging groups. It is commonly assumed that modern foraging groups are organized according to ancient social patterns, but certainly modern foraging groups have had contact with modern societies, and very likely have been altered by this contact. Moreover, modern foragering societies are clearly different from the typical modern human societies. This gives rise to an obvious question: why did some groups of humans become farmers, adapt technology, and start watching MTV, while other groups still use reeds to extract water from succulents? It is at least possible that these different groups decendented from progenitors that had different social systems and/or societal value systems, and to the extent that modern foragers preserve the social organization of their ancestors, this may be quite different from the social organization of our anscestors.
So I think we're still speculating. The forager data is evidence, but it's a long way from conclusive.
Kirby,
Stu is using patriarchy and matriarchy as they are generally used today, rather than how Bachofen used them when he says that the Christian logos is neither the one nor the other. Of course, in Bachofen's sense, it is entirely patriarchal.
Stu's use of the term has to do with whether women can be ordained, which is a separate question, but one that forces its way into the Bachofen framework via the gender maenads.
This kind of gratuitous remark is precisely what I have been concerned about throughout this discussion. You're insisting on a technical meaning of the words "matriarchy" and "patriarchy" which exists in opposition to the meaning of their root forms, arguing on the basis of these technical meanings, and then trying to make unproven side remarks based on the natural, common definitions of the words.
Yes I support the ordination of women. But that doesn't have a thing to do with the discussion here, nor is it the least bit honest to try to frame my support of ordination of women in these terms. I have absolutely no desire to create a gender monoculture of priestesses to replace the extant monoculture of priests. But I do believe that we should not deny people who have manifestly been gifted and called to the office of word and sacrament the opportunity to serve in that call, irrespective of gender. And to the extent that you read "gender politics" into that, it is pure projection.
I won't have much access to a computer for about a day and a half. Computer's down, and I'm doing a home fix-it project.
I shall try to send comments through once a day at least.
i've never read bachofen
i only know the name by sight
amid social theorists
but it does appear that he perceived something real and essential
bruce chatwin
in his observation of the "walkabout" patterns of australian aboriginals - divides human propensity into two basic camps
those who settle in communities with many other people and those who wander exemplify the basic tension in living on the planet
the wanderers maintain that nothing but evil is to be had in the sedentery lives of community dwellers the cityfolk observe the wanderers with horror and fear
my fear sense these days is that the healthy concept of home (at least in north america) has been undermined by an enforced restlessness - an infused quiet panic and fear - the economic presupposition suggesting that you might go down in flames
would you say that we are in times defined more by patriarchy than matriarchy???
my sense is those committed naturally to a healthy matriarchal way of life have adopted patriarchal methods and use them in a manner most confused most ignorant most tyrannical...but with a smile
in matters of sex and perseverant strength even one might go so far to include practical intelligence - women are superior to men - and a community does well to contain and preserve that strength for continuity -- where all energies can be directed to the sustaining of women and children
women (and men) seem to be doing this now by sacrificing some of the children
the bigger catholic consciousness - while obviously maintained by a working patriarchy (the paterfamilias is still the working idea for basic structure in RC)-
theologically speaking the notion of "Mother Church" is the concept all the faithful tap into
so there are all these fathers working for the big Mother
the catholic church is a big ole dysfunctional household one mother many fathers and look at all those damn children
the 20th century saw so much by way of destruction of humanity -- is that matriarchy run amok or patriarchy run amok??
i'd love to live in a world where patriarchs see something in nature that is inviolable - beyond control
the wiring seems all fouled up to me someone like that character in the film BRAZIL played by robert deNiro has shortcircuited and jerryrigged a bunch of wires -- when does the system blow??
what fuels inspiration
what clouds the heart in darkness
is it simply the moongoddess crapping in the night with a huge smile on her face
trenching her furrow for a tree to grow
or is it a man a god nailed to a cross
whimpering out his last pathetic poems of love to a belligerent and unworthy pack of screaming children
go figure
topothemornin
jh
Phew. A lot of dense material to read through here -
Once again, Kirby's problem with communicating is that he takes a word and uses a definition that is either broader or of a whole other kind than the standard definition that is in use today...
When he does so in terms of Marxism, I object rather adamantly, since that is such a loaded term with an original definition that is quite contrary to the broader definition he likes to use.
When he uses the Bachofen definitions for matriarchy and patriarchy, as opposed to the current definition that is generally used, I give him a bit more leeway -
If we enter into conversation with him and accept the Bachofen definitions, then I generally agree with his patriarchy vs. matriarchy points.
I think it'd be wiser to focus on the sky-God/sun-God vs. EarthGod/MoonGod symbolism than gender-based Matriarchy vs. Patriarchy.
But he knows that using the latter will stir up trouble, and he likes trouble.
If you think about the argument and push out of your mind 'patriarchy' = manincharge and 'matriarchy' = womanincharge, it all actually makes quite a bit of sense...
The SkyGod/SunGod vs. EarthGod/MoonGod metaphor is one of those few distinct things I've grasped from this blog that have upped my understanding of the universe rather significantly...
That, and Two Kingdoms, and maybe Barghest's clarity about liberals blaming institutions for evil and assuming man is essentially good...
I think dancing around a tree with a bunch of drunk people is awesome. It's a vacation from having to be worried about our timebound responsibilities, and that kind of ecstasy can give us a glimpse of the eternal and recharge us so that we're more able to tend to our timebound responsibilities.
However, such experiences are neither the highest goal of our lives nor are they from whence we get our principles. If we get too prudish, however, and say that those experiences Themselves are Evil, instead of recognizing that giving them false priority and gleaning principles from them is Evil, well...we're missing out on a part of God and not giving ourselves the vacay our souls and brains need.
We have to have times when we are not worried about time, though the behavior we exhibit during such times must be bounded by principles so that our actions won't have a deleterious effect on times ahead.
And we're living in the best, least-violent times in history, especially in the Western world. Any meta-analysis will show this -
Only those who focus on specific instances within time and whose ideas of the past are tinged with a false nostalgic sepia hue say otherwise, and they're wrong.
Stu -- the side issues loom, but as you say, don't belong in this specific conversation.
I shouldn't have brought in Democrat or Republican either.
Who knows hwich one looks more like the Callipygian Venus which is the symbol, the ur-symbol, of the ancient matriarchies.
Has anyone read MArja Gimbutas? She uses Bachofen, and is the most extreme of the nutcases finding some primeval harmonious society that never really existed in pottery shards that indicate no one knows what.
She sees Crete as the ultimate harmonious spot, that is, the Crete of the minotaur which according to legend, demanded seven perfect boys and girls from the mainland to feed the creature each year. Or was it just boys the creatues absorbed?
Until Theseus showed up.
"And we're living in the best, least-violent times in history, especially in the Western world."
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
Aggravated assault rates in the US are still 300% of the 1960 rate although they have come down by 30% since the peak in 1992. The murder rate is back down to where it was in 1960, but there have been significant advancements in emergency medical care (which is also reflected in the different killed to wounded ratios for casualties in Vietnam vs Iraq). And many more people with propensities for violence are in prison than in 1960. At least in the US something went wrong in the 1960's to reverse a centuries long trend of decreasing civil violence, and what went wrong is not yet mended.
Were the same people who were hippies and peace and love in the 60s also the same people who went toward heavy metal and satanism in the 70s or was this two separate demographics?
Marc Bolan who was the lead singer for T. Rex was a folk singer in the 60s and later made the transition to hard metal (he's hard to categorize, but Bang a Gong is, I think, hard metal, at least for that period?)
How did Woodstock become Altamont?
The US is not the world.
hahhahhahhah
choooooooooooo!
sorry
hayfever
sniffle
schnort
jh
Ginsberg and Neal Cassady and others had a sit-down of some kind in the sixties with Sonny Barger of the Hell's Angels. I don't know what they accomplished.
All the different factions in the 60s radicals groups liked to party, and they sometimes partied together.
The poetry demographic would have been quite separate from the biker graphic, and the drugs they used would have been different to some extent, I think, too.
The biker gangs were for the war in Vietnam. They trashed (on several occasions, I think) peacenik protests against the Vietnam War.
Sonny Barger, the head of the Hell's angels, was a party-goer. But his demographic was not terribly erudite, although I think he did write an autobiography (probably with help).
The sixties had a lot of different factions.
There were also very conservative student groups who succeeded in getting Goldwater into the Republican saddle. They later got Reagan elected.
Hell's Angels may have been Republican, and yet, they strongly resemble Bachofen's matriarchal gangs of male tyrants, even down to the long hair.
Mixed into the whole scene were bisexual, NAMBLA, and other groups.
Very difficult to find the sixties as one monolithic group.
The methamphetamine scene of today would have had no or very little crossover with the potsmokers in demographics like that of Donovan.
Today violence is so out of control, but again, only in certain demographic groups. Among African-American men it is quite high, especially when there are drug-gangs involved.
The erudite left tends to romanticize actual criminal elements, and to sympathize with them, and to see not much difference between them and the criminals who police them.
Rolling Stones number went, "And every cop is a criminal, and all the criminals saints."
In this mix, the Hollywood left partied with the Manson gang. Beach Boys actually recorded a Manson song. There was all kinds of cross-over, and mixing.
I think that the left may have had some principles but lost them in the sixties, getting mixed up with drugs, promiscuous sex, and so on.
Elements like the Catholics may have had just enough of a framework to keep them from going under into the maelstrom. Those who rejected even the ten commandments must have gotten lost.
Hippies were like many leftists today having only the Sermon on the Mount to go by, and I think "love" got confused with "making love," (it's important to retain fundamental definitions).
Bachofen clarifies the whole ballgame, once and for all.
There is more violent crime in England than America.
http://wheelgun.blogspot.com/2007/01/crime-in-uk-versus-crime-in-us.html
and I think the same is true about Australia.
Singapore on the other hand has almost no violent crime, and Japan and Honk Kong have little. I don't know anything about China. I think Africa is more violent than it was under colonial governance but someone please correct me if I'm wrong. Russia is not doing well (their murder rate is almost 3 times ours), but I don't know what the situation was like under the Soviets. The murder rate in India is roughly the same as ours, but the data for aggravated assault seems untrustworthy. See here for a discussion,
http://nitawriter.wordpress.com/2007/08/16/violent-crime-different-parts-of-world/
It appears that most of western Europe has experiences a rise in violent crime in the second half of the 20th century after falling for 400 years. There are many nice graphs here,
http://videojuegosycultura.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/long-term-historical-trends-of-violent-crime.pdf
William, I read all three of your links through. The first two were good, but didn't (it seemed to me) draw the most obvious conclusions as to why a state like S. Dakota would be low in homicides: the Protestant Reformation.
Your last link was by far the best, written by an actual criminologist, and looks at Protestantism as one of the central markings of civilized behavior. I will note that we occasionally get wild, angry posts here (which I have decided to summarily reject), that threaten posters with death and dismemberment, and even threaten our children, and they are always be people who likewise are angry about Protestantism!:
"Commenting on the downturn of interpersonal
violence in Swedish cities after about 1630, Jarrick and So¨ derberg
(1993) emphasize that there is no concomitant increase in state intervention
that could explain the shift. Rather, the decline appears to have
coincided with an increased concern, disseminated by the Lutheran
church, about the expiation of sin and an intensified attention to issues
of human dignity and empathy for the weak. Likewise, the decline in
serious violence in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England appears
to have been embedded in a distinct cultural climate where principles
of Protestantism combined with notions of individual responsibility
(Gaskill 2000, pp. 203 ff.). A pervasive culture of Protestantism,
disseminated through cheap print, embedded violence in a dense rhet
oric of providence, sin, and repentance. Pamphlets and ballads told
an interested audience about how murderers—‘‘troubled in conscience’’—
felt remorse for their acts, how dying victims piously forgave
their assailants, and how the justice of heaven and earth would
combine to punish the evildoer."
132
Manuel Eisner
There were other salutary chunks in which Protestantism was featured.
In general, if you reflect for instance on the Hell's angels, they are not particularly Protestant in either form or character. A large portion of the sixties left did move in that direction, but many of them also came out of church movements.
I would be willing to bet that the people who made up the Weathermen were largely people who rejected Protestantism.
The article also said that alcohol was a predictive factor. Most Protestants don't drink, or if they do, would rarely allow themselves to lose control while under the influence. I don't think my father ever drank a drop of any kind of alcohol. He even refused the wine in the communion cup, and asked for grape juice instead.
I don't think my father ever lost his temper even once in 78 years of life, unless he did so as a child.
I missed JH's poem comment of two days back -- was travelling. Just wanted to thank him for the moon goddess pooping in the woods.
The rate of violent crime in Singapore and Japan is very low, and I don't think it has anything to do with Protestantism.
There are multiple paths to a good civic order.
Singapore is a fascinating problem for human rights activists. It doesn't have press freedoms. It doesn't have a lot of western freedoms. But it is clean and quite safe and prosperous.
Japan, according to Bachofen, was matriarchal, but he's talking about 1860, and the rising sun image was contested by some female deity that he claimed meant tyranny. Of course, we rewrote the Japanese constitution after WWII and wrote in western freedoms.
Japan is the best argument for Iraq and Afghanistan.
But in Japan you were starting with a westernized, intelligent population without much of a religious heritage. They HAVE adopted some Christian traditions. Aboiut a tenth of Japanese are Christian. Everybody in Japan celebrates Christmas now, which just means opening packages.
The situation for women in Japan is improving. I think it is stable in Singapore.
I tried to read a book called Can Asians Think? a deliberately provocative title by the Singaporean ambassador to the US. He claims they can, but they think differently from the west, and they don't need our help, thank you very much.
SOMEBODY'S focusing on 'murder' and not death-by-violence.
Ruh roh, gettin' a little too specific on us!
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html
Wars, and executions of guilty people, don't count, do they?
Also, police actions like the American Civil War, or interventions into Afghanistan, to free the women from illiteracy, don't count.
You can only count one on one violence where the perpetrator is acting out of sheer malevolence.
Wars don't count? When talking about the level of peace?
Kiiiiiirrrrrrrbbbby, you drunk or sumpin'?
Well, I think intentions count. If you are trying to help other people, like by shooting bank robbers who are holding hostages, that doesn't count as violence.
That counts as an act of charity.
In the same way, killing slaveholders who can't be talked into giving up slavery, is not an act of violence.
It goes in the charity column.
Pinker is a stinker in terms of how he counts. He cites passages from the OT in which they kill some folks called the Medianites, and have to kill all the men as part of the deal. They then keep the virgins.
He says they can do this in order to rape them.
What a strange extraction he makes there.
I had to turn it off. It was like watching someone play speed chess and taking pieces off the board willy nilly like some kind of a hatter.
the piece that William Barghest linked to seemed a lot more sane, but then his central notion wasn't to entirely rewrite human history, as Pinker the Stinker wanted to do.
Here's a bit of Biblical explanation I found. Pinker just leaped to the easiest possible conclusion and presented it as fact:
"There are two parts to this objection: did God instruct or permit the soldiers to rape the women, and did the soldiers actually rape them?
It's clear that God didn't intend for the soldiers to rape the women, but rather to take them captive. The law God had given to the Israelites condemned rape, in some cases punishing it with death (Dt 22:25-27). Also, immediately following the command to spare the virgin women, the soldiers were instructed to purify themselves and their captives (31:19), and rape (or consensual intercourse) would have violated this command (Lev 15:16-18). In the rest of the chapter, the women are usually referred to as people (using the masculine adam), not women or virgins, underscoring the notion that they were seen as captives rather than sexual objects.1
It's theoretically possible that some of the soldiers raped the women, but given the circumstances it seems very unlikely. The soldiers would have known that rape was a violation of both the law and the instruction to purify themselves, as shown above; they had also seen God punish such violations with death during their travels in the desert. In fact, they had recently experienced a plague and executions resulting from their relations with Midianite women (25:1-9), as Moses reminded them. At that time, all those who had sexual relations with the Midianites were killed. It's highly implausible that the soldiers would have wanted to have anything to do with the Midianite women given this context.
So what did happen to the women (and children)? God gave the Israelites permission to marry women they took captive, but they were to treat their wives with respect: the women were to have time to mourn their families first, and were not to be mistreated (Dt 21:10-14). Those who didn't marry would have become servants, but there were rules against mistreating them as well (Ex 21:26-27, Dt 23:15-16). See the article on slavery laws for more on the treatment of female slaves."
Brett,
Thanks for the link to Steven Pinker. I was aware that civil violence was a MUCH greater problem in the middle ages than it is now. My contention is that civil violence was lower in western societies from the late 19th century until the 1960's, when the 400 year long trend of decreasing civil violence reversed. Pinker incorrectly states that the 60's freakout is over by only showing US murder rates, which though they have fallen back to pre 1960's levels are not mirrored by US aggravated assault rates (due in part to improvements in emergency medical treatment) and violent crime rates in European countries.
I have some issues with the state-based military conflict deaths. At 8:02 he claims that there has been a steep decline since 1945 in interstate wars in Europe and the Americas, without mentioning the rest of the world (I think Africa, Asia and the Middle East have been fighting a fair number of wars since then), and he shows a graph subsequently indicating that fewer people have been dying per war per year since the 1950's without showing the number of conflicts per year. That being said, I can believe that fewer people have been dying (and been injured) in wars since the 1960's. I don't know if this compensates for the uptick in civil violence in western countries though. The US is loosing about 30,000 people a year to criminal homocide, and there are 50 times that number of aggravated assaults. We were loosing 80,000 people a year for the 4 years of WW2 (The US has 1/2 the population then so it's like 160,000 today), with an equal number of non-fatal serious injuries. In Iraq the killed to wounded ratio is 1 to 8 instead of 1 to 1 in WW2 because of improved emergency medicine. For similar reasons aggravated assault to homicide ratios in the US have gone from 9 to 1 in 1935 to 50 to 1 in 2008. If you adjust for the improvements in medical technology WW2 would be costing us about as many lives per year as murder does now, but it only lasted 4 years. Granted, the US had it pretty easy in WW2, Europe and east Asia had it much worse, but it doesn't take a large increase in civil violence to equal the deaths and injuries from war since wars tend to be of limited duration.
I also don't see why having fewer wars excuses the epidemic of civil violence we are experiencing. They may both be related to a decline in civil authority and obedience to social roles. In WWI the young men of the (much more orderly) western societies went quite enthusiastically into the trenches to be slaughtered out of a sense of duty that I just have trouble comprehending. I think both the crime epidemic we are experiencing now, and the large scale wars we have fought in the past were terrible things, but I don't believe that we must choose between one or the other.
I agree with your first sentiment - but we're not here judging individual acts, but rather talking about the peacefulness of society...
If one is more often forced to kill for the sake of good, one is necessarily living in a less peaceful society.
Doy.
The stinker makes a dumbssumption that the spared virgins are to be raped...But this has little to do with the overall thesis..it's just someone with a bias lobbing out a fruitless, tangential, kneejerk comment...something you're rather adept at, Kirbster:-) IOW, focusing on that is sorta fallacious of ya.
"The first two were good, but didn't (it seemed to me) draw the most obvious conclusions as to why a state like S. Dakota would be low in homicides: the Protestant Reformation."
The state with the lowest homicide rate in the US (the rate is below that of several European countries) is New Hampshire.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state
Northern New England (New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine) are the least religious states in the country according to this survey
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0608/11268.html.
Kirby.
Why do you hold it was not violent, due to God's command, for the Isrealites to kill all the Medians except for the virgins who are (best case scenario) forced to be wives or consorts?
Cannot God command the Isrealites to commit violence?
William, I think we have to separate motives from actions. If someone kills for a higher good (a policeman shoots a sniper who has been hitting pedestrians from a tower) then it's different than someone clubbing their spouse to death over the issue of whose turn it is to do the laundry.
In the case of the Jews, God had commanded them to do what they did. The Medianites had been sabotaging the Jews and separating them from God.
So, they were guilty, and had to be destroyed.
I think it's possible to kill in a selfless way (the police sharpshooter who takes out a deranged sniper doesn't get anything out of taking out the sniper).
In the same way, a soldier in Afghanistan doesn't get anything by helping those people over there fight off their corrupt and enslaving government.
Someone who kills just to take someone's wallet, on the other hand, is acting out of a personal motive.
Pinker the stinker makes so many vindictive and invidious statements against the Jews that I think he's guilty of imputing to them motivations that were not theirs. He does this in a triumphalist manner (one can almost see the vainglory on his face as he announces his psychotic ideas one after another, as if he's some kind of communist machinegun taking out everything we believe in).
I found it hard to take in anything he was saying.
The Manuel Eisner piece you linked to was more closely argued and closely documented.
On the other issue you raised, about New Hampshire, I don't know very much. New Hampshire is one of the only New England states that is likely to go Republican.
It didn't in the last election, but I think the last election is the last time people will be fooled into voting for a magnetic candidate with no track record on the basis of hope for change.
I think the sinking poll numbers reveal that the Big O is sinking up to his neck in various quagmires-- some of his own making, and others not.
We still don't understand Obama. I think this is because there's no central program. If he does have cards he's very good at hiding them. I suspect Reverend Wright is still the person he's closest to, and when he prays, if he does, he has Reverend Wright's thinking foremost in his thought.
Who is Wright? A race hustler who does a dance with liberation theology.
Obama was astonished by the poor reception Wright's views got in middle America. So he has to hide that.
Often matriarchy masquerades as patriarchy, and vice versa.
Obama's better off now than Clinton or Reagan were at similar times in their presidencies...
All of the OMG his presidency is falling apart! Wharrgarbl from the right is hogwash if one backs up and gets a bit of perspective.
The right tries to paint him as a Carter figure - a closer analogy, in my mind, would be that he's a more successful version of Clinton in a more difficult time.
The claim from the right that someone on the left just 'isn't known' is such a tired attack line...I have been unsurprised by almost anything that Obama has done because I had a pretty good perspective that he's a pragmatic center-left politician.
He is not uncompromising - this does not make him unknowable.
I liked the photo of him today off the coast of Florida, splashing about with his daughter in the surf. They looked like they were having fun.
His wife is also having a lot of fun in Spain lately with sixty guests.
I wish the rest of the country was having fun.
Is Baby Doc still alive? I hope he's having fun.
I hope Bin Laden is having fun.
I want everyone to have some fun.
Summer is almost over.
From:
http://www.answers.com/topic/english-civil-war-radicalism
"The Ranters, convinced that God's spirit was to be found within, proclaimed that to the pure, all things were pure. Such a principle could easily open the way to immorality of every kind, and Ranters were repeatedly condemned as promiscuous and blasphemous atheists. Some individuals did pursue the libertine implications of their creed. Others, especially Coppe, proclaimed a social gospel that echoed Christ's Sermon on the Mount, defining true religion as caring for the sick and destitute, and condemning the traditional Puritan preoccupations with sex, blasphemy, and "correct" forms of worship as mere hypocrisy. The real sins, Coppe insisted, were the pride and greed that sustained a social order both oppressive and unjust."
Sound familiar? How did the 60's kids rediscover Ranterism?
Abiezer Coppe (1619-1672)
A Fiery Flying Roll (1649)
"For this Honor, Nobility, Gentility, Propriety, Superfluity hath been the Father of hellish pride arrogance, haughtiness, loftiness, murder malice,of all manner of wickednedd and impiety; yea the cause of all the blood that ever hath been shed, from the blood of the righteous Abell, to the blood of the last Levellers that were shot to death. And now (as I live saith the Lord) I am come to make inquisition for blood for murder and pride.
I see the root of it all. The Axe is laid to the root of the Tree (by the Eternall God, My Self, saith the Lord) I will hew it down. And as I live, I well plague your Honour, Pomp, Greatness, Superfluity, and confound it into parity, equality, community; that the rock of the horrid, pride, murder, malice, and tyranny may be chopt off at one blow. And that my selfe, the Eternmall God. who am Universall Love, may fill the Earth with universal love, universal peace, and perfect freedome; which can never be by humane sword or strength accomplished. "
To summarize: The establishment is evil, but I may by fighting the establishment, because I contain godlike goodness, bring love, peace, and freedom to the world, which can never be accomplished by authority.
Does this 17th century radical Puritan heresy accurately summarize the core beliefs of modern progressive activists?
William, equality is something that the Puritans used to create the basis for democracy. They argued that we were all born in the image of God.
But there are so many different strands! Coppe is particularly weird with his fiery flying rolls (like rants).
There is a contemporary writer named Bob Black who still writes like this and refers to Coppe from time to time in his work.
I think you're on to something here, but I don't know enough about the crazier side of this movement. Some of them drank a lot and had lots of sexual hijinks going on. That would be more like the progressives. Most progressives think it's ok to drink. But I don't think they are as obsessive as some of the English in this weird phase.
There are also people like Royalist poet John Suckling in this period. He believed in Socinianism. Which means that God had to be completely reasonable.
It was the beginning of what we now know as Unitarianism.
One strand of Lutheranism tends that way.
Whenever reason gets exalted at the expense of faith I think you are starting to get something like where the progressives are tending.
It goes back to Pelagius.
I don't see how reason can do anything at all without basic precepts, which have to be taken on faith. The ten commandments aren't exactly founded in reason, although they do make sense, or make a community that makes sense.
William,
Let me wade back in. I often consider myself to be progressive, although I consider it to be a somewhat misleading term when used, as it often is, to partition the Democratic Party into pro-establishment and anti-establishment wings. This hardly gives me the license to speak for Progressivism as a whole, so this is, as usual, just my personal take.
To summarize: The establishment is evil, but I may by fighting the establishment, because I contain godlike goodness, bring love, peace, and freedom to the world, which can never be accomplished by authority.
Does this 17th century radical Puritan heresy accurately summarize the core beliefs of modern progressive activists?
There is some truth in this. The ambivalence that some on the left feel towards Obama rests not so much over his efficacy in pressing through a pragmatic center-left agenda (for which he deserves decently high marks, whatever some say), but over the cognative dissonance that comes from suddenly having a stake in an administration, and so having a stake in the establishment that they're conditioned to view as "other." But I see this as balancing the equally unhinged view that is implicit on the right: that power is an entitlement of the white male, and so a black President who appoints women to the SCOTUS is playing an identity politics game, and they're not. Let me make an obvious point here: if you're out of balance, corrections towards balance are necessarily going to be out of balance as well, if judged in isolation.
But a common, if dishonest, part of the contemporary political discussion is to cherry-pick extreme or ill-founded viewed held by a few in the opposition, and then trying to characterize them as representative or even universally held among the opposition. And that's where the "some truth" ends. The views you point out are indeed held by some, but they are by no means universal among progressives. Just as some on the right (and indeed, left) are racist, but this is by no means universal on either wing, and is thankfully less common on both.
For my part, I think there's a fundamental theological error involved in naively assigning moral agency to an aggregate such as "the Establishment." Moral agency is an attribute of individual. The Nurenburg defense won't impress St. Peter, either. We know that all are sinners and saints, but also that the balance varies, and the balance matters in terms of the impact of an individual on society. [Note to Kirby: this is not Pelagian -- I've not claimed and won't claim that the balance is relevant to salvation, I am speaking only to the use of the law in ordering human society for our own benefit.] I've known some establishment figures that are reasonably saintly as humans judge such, and also some that are decidedly sinful.
One way, though, in which it does make sense to ascribe moral agency to aggregates is the extent to which there's a shared culture that tends to self-select for people from one end of the sinner-saint distribution or the other. In particular, the current Wall Street ethos, which amounts to unbridled me-first-ism, or "greed is good," tends to self-select from those whose God is mammon. I don't believe that the economic establishment has quite decended to the level of the robber-barron days, but we're a lot closer than I believe serves the interests of society generally, and so I believe it is responsible for the government to intervene to curb abuses, and so alter the culture in a more socially responsible direction.
YMMV.
In thinking of relative social positions and their arguments with regard to change vs. stability, it's helpful to go back to Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, which opens with a chapter on Heraclitus.
Popper argues that Heraclitus was "heir to the royal family of priest kings of Ephesus," (15), but there are new revolutionary forces in Ephesus (not clear who this was, exactly, as it's been ten years since I read the chapter!).
Heraclitus doesn't like it, because his own status is threatened. Heraclitus writes, "A people ought to fight for the laws of the city as if they were its walls" (16).
Popper argues that Plato held a similar position -- a wealthy young man in Athens -- whose position was threatened by all the new sophists and demagogues who had come to Athens, and had undermined the laws, and presented baffling new ideas which threatened to undermine his society and send it all tumbling into the void.
In general, revolutionaries like Coppe (who William brings in) are people who are not in the inner circles of power within a given hierarchy and so they threaten to destabilize the whole legitimacy of -- for instance -- the divine right of kings -- and present instead the notion that we are all born in the image of God, and thus, equal.
Even today, notions like "hope and change," are part of the revolutionary party, or the party that hopes to get closer to power, and to destabilize the Supreme Court and other institutions in order to destroy the stability that has kept certain people in positions of authority.
You can see this in Coppe, even in the tiny fragment that William Barghest handed to us.
Heraclitus holds that all war between the classes always emerges with a just outcome, and that God is always present in history. Popper links this to Hegel's theory of history (that everything is always already seen by God).
Marxists use a similar notion to justify their takeover of societies, to argue that they are the natural heirs to bourgeois society.
I find this rather confusing, ultimately -- but basically he's saying that chance and free will rather than destiny mark the open society, while what God wants is what we want, marks the closed society.
Popper was raised as a Lutheran, but was from a Jewish family, is how I think it went.
History's verdicts are God's verdicts, is what Popper says that Heraclitus is saying.
Now we use the People to legitimate government. Obama for instance keeps saying, simply, as a rationale for his undertakings, "We won the election."
Of course, most of the electorate is against his undertakings. He got in on false pretenses. Few want his enormous bailout (we still don't know what's in it, and the media isn't about to look very deeply into it). His crazy notion of universal healthcare is unpopular. His unwillingness to deal with illegal immigrants is unpopular.
But he still argues that he won the election, so he can do whatever the heck he wants.
It's also important to remember that Bachofen was a conservative in Swiss politics of his time.
I don't know precisely why I'm a conservative. I'm hardly rich. I will have to die in the classroom rather than ever retire.
I think it's because the Marxists are coming, and I don't like the closed society that they represent. I see Marxists as tyrants who masquerade in the name of freedom. And I see the Democrats as Marxists in everything but name. They want ot legitimate a take-over, and erase all the known laws, and substitute instead a law that is biased in favor of their own race, gender, and class.
I think the middle-classes will get a better shake with the likes of Palin and McCain, and others who ... share my experience at least to some degree, and who reach back to Madison and Locke and others. Not Marx.
Stu, RGC politics is really not about RGC but about the similarity of thinking of various people which is absolute homogeneity disguised as diversity.
So both sides operate from within the other's rubric. PC pretends to be open, but is the most closed society imaginable. There is absolutely no room for diversity of thought within this crowd.
Republicans now also cynically use RGC to tickle the left. Sarah Palin is a mother, and a woman, and a mother of very different children.
But she hasn't been reeducated, as we have all been! The left cries. she's not the SAME as us.
Point: it's NOT about RGC at ALL, but about creating a monolithic tyrannical control of all thought, using diversity as a feint, or disguise. but if you look beneath the supposed diversity of RGC, it's about something quite different. It's not about freedom or inclusion. Quite the opposite. It isn't at all what it is. It's about creating an absolute norming framework of Marxist thinking. If you step out of that framework for a minute, you're toast.
Palin is a woman, and yet she is absolute toast within the RGC "liberal" crowd, which is actually anything but liberal (open-minded).
That's why you and Brett don't really belong over there.
Kirby,
For any who are still following, RGC = Race, Gender, Class. It took me a while to figure that out, because I don't obsess over these issues the way Kirby does. So far as I'm concerned, race and gender issues are settled in theory, but not in practice, and the weight of history is settling practice too. Class is settled neither in theory nor in practice, and remains an area of active debate and analysis. I expect that Kirby and I agree that there is a class cold-war ongoing, but I suspect we'd disagree in that I see it as largely a war that the rich are waging against the poor.
And I disagree strongly that political correctness stifles all diversity of opinion. Political correctness amounts to this: our words and actions should conform to our beliefs, and overcoming cultural inertia requires both vigilance and retraining. But outside of proscribing traditional values, language, and behaviors that are at odds with a belief in racial and gender equality, PC-ism has little to say. It is very far from a universal system.
Indeed, the famous Will Roger's aphorism seems apropos, and entirely contradictory to Kirby's view of a monolithic left: "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat."
Stu, Will Rogers died in August, 1935. I'm not sure exactly when he made his statement, or when he became a Democrat. Roosevelt was in office when he died.
Democrats still believed to some extent in a work ethic back then. WPA put people back to work. Even Social Security is still tied to work.
It was in the sixties or so that Democrats began to believe in something for nothing, and set out the huge redistribution programs beginning with bussing, Affirmative Action, quota systems, and heralding all the firsts (rather than the bests) which they continue to push.
It's lawless, and is creating horrific conditions. Arizona is the worst aspect of this -- Obama has declared that law cannot be followed up on if the person has darker skin. The drug cartels are rolling over Arizona, and have threatened sheriffs and troopers with death, just as they have on their side of the now non-existent border.
I do think there should be universal human rights, but they have to be universal. That is, law must be universal. If one group is committing all the crimes, or most of them, how does it help to get rid of racial nomenclature that names this group?
It's becoming nonsense in which plain fact cannot be spoken. Even in Obama's administration is a man who was fired for asking why women have not contributed as much to mathematics as men.
I grant that the Democrats, like the communists in Russia in 1917, meant well, but what they created is another matter entirely.
Even in poetry we have evidence of the matriarchal set, and the way in which they have destroyed true criticism, and created a two-tier system in which women and minorities can only be praised, while white straight men can only be praised if they are Marxist rabble-rousers.
Could Will Rogers even speak today, when he let loose witticisms like this:
"When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states."
Yes, he could, because the Okies were white. It's how the Democrats have always unfailingly spoken. they work through scapegoating and name-calling and pushing their faction as the one good one.
It's the basis of To Kill a Mockingbird which the left just loves.
This is brilliantly done, Stu. The Niebuhr quote was wonderfully played.
How about then, "It is what it is, except when it isn't."
The problem with the original quote "It is what it is," is that it can be too broadly applied. I hear it all the time -- ever from get'er done types.
Stuck in a traffic jam? Live with it (instead of attempting an alternative route on backroads).
Unable to publish a poetry book because contests belong to cartels?
Just accept it, and put the poems away.
I see this kind of resignation quite a bit. I think we need to fight for what is right, and remain active.
Of course, in the face of a parent's death, when there's nothing to be done, you have to simply accept it. My father's death was probably too soon. Had he had an aspirin, he would probably have lived.
So even there it's important to think about what could be done differently.
I think the country has gotten too passive.
We can't do anythnig about illegal immigration.
We can't figure out alternative energy sources.
We can't beat the Chinese, and get jobs back into our country.
The whole country's going down, people say, there's nothing to be done.
We're going the way of the British empire, people say. Soon we'll back a backwater.
But if we get real principles of quality back in mind, I think we can turn this rig around.
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