Another week, another twittering of Tweets and other connective coincidences of the … oh, whatever you want to call it. Usual categories, usual possibly-useful items, usual ‘Read more…’ link:
I fear I’ve overdone it this week – almost twice as many as usual. Still, that’s what I collected as the week’s Tweets and links, so here y’is, y’all. Usual categories, after the usual ‘Read more…’ link.
Whilst working on a previous post on rights and responsibilities, I needed to hunt out the original of a phrase attributed to the anthropologist Margaret Mead, that “motherhood is a biological fact, fatherhood is a social fiction”. A quick search brought me to Jone Johnston Lewis’ ‘Women’s History‘ site, which showed me that the correct quote is “mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social invention”. What I’d written was close enough, I guess – especially as I was only paraphrasing it anyway.
But what then caught my eye was this longer quote:
The male form of a female liberationist is a male liberationist — a man who realizes the unfairness of having to work all his life to support a wife and children so that someday his widow may live in comfort, a man who points out that commuting to a job he doesn’t like is just as oppressive as his wife’s imprisonment in a suburb, a man who rejects his exclusion, by society and most women, from participation in childbirth and the most engrossing, delightful care of young children — a man, in fact, who wants to relate himself to people and the world around him as a person.
The anthropologist’s eye indeed – perceptive, insightful, yet also respectful of ‘the Other’. Almost the exact antithesis, in fact, of so many of the self-styled advocates of ‘gender-liberation’ that I’ve had the misfortune to deal with for most of my adult life. Where Margaret Mead had argued that the core principle would have to be that “every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man”, instead far too many feminists and self-styled ‘pro-feminist’ men both then and since have patently believed that the only way to ‘liberate’ a woman was to enslave a man – and preferably via as much pain and prejudice as was practicably possible. In short, their method for reducing gender-violence was to increase it as much as they could: and then, when that didn’t work – because it doesn’t, and can’t – keep on ratchetting up the pain in the relentless pursuit of Other-blame.
This mistake affects different countries in different ways. Australia is perhaps one of the worst: for example, for the first ten years that I was there, the Melbourne newspaper The Age never published a single piece that was overtly respectful of men as a gender; and for the next decade, although such items did occasionally appear, they would each invariably be juxtaposed with another much larger article stridently reaffirming the ‘truth’ of the inherent evils of men. As I discovered whilst I was helping two of my lesbian friends recover after they’d ended their relationship in a knife-fight, the domestic-violence agencies defined violence as inherently ‘male’: there was no support available for lesbians (unless they blamed a man – my friends didn’t and wouldn’t, and were firmly told to go away because they were ‘rocking the boat’…!), and certainly no help for any man at all – even though the unlaundered hard-data showed that men were (and still are) the majority of domestic-violence victims in that country. And in my home state it was (and I believe still is) not merely a dismissable but criminal offence for a male primary-school teacher to comfort a crying child. All of this in the name of so-called ‘gender equality’…
Again in Australia, it was clear that many if not most of the ‘pro-feminist’ men I came across were not pro-women at all – in fact far from it, in several cases I personally knew. Instead, they were either lost in a vaguely-Marxist delusion that “it is impossible for one to have more without others having less” – and hence attacked men-as-a-gender (or all men other than themselves and their co-religionists, to be precise) under the mistaken belief that this would somehow automatically make things better for women (it doesn’t) – or else were still obsessively trying to hurt men-in-general as ‘payback’ for childhood hurts from other boys (which is a seriously dangerous form of self-dishonesty). It’s true that I did meet a few ‘pro-feminist’ men who genuinely were pro-women – but in every case they understood exactly Mead’s point that to be ‘pro-women’ we must also be ‘pro-men’. The blunt fact is that the only way that works is to create a frame in which everyone wins – otherwise everyone loses.
It’s not much better in Britain – there’s still the same massive dishonesty about domestic-violence, for example. In so many ‘Western’ countries, the main result of so-called ‘equal opportunity’ in employment has been to re-entrap women back in the same paid-workforce mess as men – a feminist tragedy of epic proportions, given that the main aim of the women’s movement for much of the previous century was to get women out of the paid-workforce, and free up at least some part of the community to repair the ongoing damage created the myopic self-centredness of the ‘money-economy’. (The real need, then and now, is to challenge the inanity and insanity of that economic model – not merely argue about who should or should not have the ‘right’ to not be enslaved in it!)
The Latin countries – for all their complexity and chaos – seem somehow to have a much better understanding of what gender-equality really means in practice, and to me seem much more human overall. In Portugal, for example, it was a huge relief to find it was considered normal for me to play mime-games and visual jokes with small children in their family and social settings; by contrast, back in Australia it was frequently assumed that, as a middle-aged man, I must be some kind of dangerous sexual-pervert if I merely smiled at a child in the street. Which hurts, a lot, that aggressive, pointless, baseless “exclusion, by society and most women, from participation in … the most engrossing, delightful care of young children”: a human, natural smile is merely an expression of the human need to be in and part of – rather than enforced apart from – the society that I’m in. In other words, as Mead put it, ”a man … who wants to relate himself to people and the world around him as a person”.
The sad tragedy is that so much of feminism started out from a drive towards a true equality, but somehow lost its way in a paediarchal flight into a blame-filled fantasy, an increasingly-desperate addiction to ‘Other-blame’ as a means to evade responsibility in any form. Even now, forty or fifty years later, so much of it is still rampantly and obsessively anti-male, even rabidly sexist at times in the worst possible way. Yet it doesn’t work: and the reason why it doesn’t work is that too many feminists have forgotten the simple fact that, just like women, men are human too. Equality cannot truly exist for anyone unless all of us are considered equally human – with all that that implies.
Margaret Mead never forgot that fact: it’s one of the reason I value her work and life so much – and likewise those other rare, amazing and courageous women alongside whom it’s sometimes been my great privilege to work. Yet what strikes me most about Mead, I suppose, is her simple humanity:
One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.
Contrast that brief sentence, perhaps, with Margaret Thatcher’s inane assertion that “there is no such thing as society”. I don’t think anyone but Mead could have described the human condition and the true nature of society any better or more poignantly than that.
Interesting insights indeed.
In part this is a follow-on from the previous post on the fundamental flaws underlying all forms of currency, but it also has many implications for businesses, enterprise-architectures, societal models, corporate social responsibility and much else besides.
And don’t worry, I’ll aim to keep this one short(ish) 
[later: turns out it's another long one - sorry...] – though I’ll probably return to the theme quite a bit in subsequent posts.
The key point in the previous post was that no ‘alternative-currency’ would solve the socioeconomic problems that we currently face: the all-too-evident failures and failings of the money-economy are merely at the symptom level, and attempting to replace conventional state-issued currency with some other kind of home-grown alternative would be merely one more variant on the theme of ’shifting deckchairs on the Titanic‘.
Yet clearly we do need something that will enable us to operate the kind of global-scale exchanges that our current economic models allow – because without that, it’s obvious that the city-based cultures especially could quickly collapse into anarchy of the worst possible kind.
It might perhaps be a surprise that what I’m suggesting here as an alternative actually is anarchy – but anarchy only in a strict technical sense, and of a radically different form.
Let me explain.
In the previous post I hope I made it clear that there is no way in which a possession-based economy can be made sustainable. Therein lies the real economic problem: possession is a classic example of the antipattern that “for every complex problem there’s a least one clear, easily-understood wrong answer”.
Underpinning that ‘wrong answer’ is another even deeper ‘wrong answer’: the notion of rights. Possession is defined as a right – the right to personal property, and so on. (In British law it’s more subtle again, in that it’s actually defined as a right to exclude others from access to resources that they may need: as the 18th-century jurist William Blackstone put it, “that “sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe”.) But there’s a catch – a very important catch. To paraphrase Margaret Mead:
Rights are a social fiction; responsibilities are a social fact.
More to the point, it’s probable that responsibilities are the ’social fact’ – that the structure of a society is actually an emergent property that arises from the intermeshing of mutual responsibilities. A society – and hence that society’s economics – arise from those mutual responsibilities. A society’s economics represent its recognised means and controls via which its available resources are shared, exchanged and used – and those ‘means and controls’ are, in effect, defined and circumscribed by mutual responsibilities.
You might ask “So where do rights come into this?” But that’s the whole point: they don’t. Rights don’t even exist in any real sense: they’re just a convenient social fiction, useful for some circumstances – as we’ll see in a moment – but dangerously misleading in others. And economics and purported ‘rights of possession’ are a good example of where the rights-discourse is indeed dangerously misleading – as all of us are discovering right now…
Any competent observer of economics would acknowledge that the money-based model on which most current economics is based is in deep trouble right now: somewhere between seriously-dysfunctional and completely broken. Many of the purported key-metrics such as GDP and GNP don’t really tell us anything useful at all about the actual functioning of the economy: all they describe, really, is the potential tax-base, in monetary terms – and the distortions that this introduces into the economic picture are the direct cause of many economic problems. Banking and, especially, finance have moved so far from their functional roots that they’re now little more than engines for embezzlement on an almost unimaginable scale. And the preferred ’solution’ to the fact that many, many things cannot be meaningfully described in monetary terms is simply to declare that such things do not exist or, if they do, they cannot conceivably matter within the overall economy.
(I won’t give links for any of those assertions above: we’d be here all day. They’re all well-known and long-proven problems, as a few hours’ worth of careful web-searches will demonstrate all too clearly. Just take it as read for the moment that that’s so, because the details as such aren’t that relevant right here.)
Given that there’s a perceived problem with the ‘money-economy’, what can we do about it? Well, the usual ’solution’ – and I use that term advisedly – is to rush out and devise some form of alternative-currency. I’ve seen dozens of these so far, and apparently there are actually thousands of these projects, across a whole spectrum from simple barter to community-based currencies to time-based currencies. But they all have one thing in common: they won’t work.
Not just ‘won’t work’: they actually can’t work. They can’t solve the problems that we face.
No form of currency will satisfy all of the requirements for managing an economy, without requiring distortions to the economy itself that will render that economy non-viable or non-sustainable, especially over the longer term.
And there’s no way round that fact.
My apologies if that fact offends anyone, but it is indeed a fact. And refusing to face that fact is not going to help anyone. Sorry.
Another week’s worth of Tweets and links – rather more than usual, this time. Same categories as usual, though, following the usual ‘More info…’ link:
A bit late again – got a bit distracted. Never mind, here’s another week’s-worth of Tweets and links, sorted into the usual categories, after the usual ‘Read more…’ link:
Another week’s collection of Tweets and links. Usual categories, mostly: share and enjoy?
Finally catching up again: last week’s collection of Tweets and links. Usual categories unless otherwise noted.