... wait for no man. But it is interesting how we attempt to optimize said time based on what our priorities are. Too often, these priorities are dictated by social norms. We spend so much time studying to get our degrees, then we spend so much time in the workplace making our money, etc., sometimes neglecting our physical and mental health. The physical side when we sit at a desk for eight hours and insist that we need to drive to work and to lunch every day, the mental side when we are overcome by the stress associated with what we are trying to achieve.
And this only increases with the increase of how work is run in an increasingly globalized market that is based less on capital itself and more on the time that it takes to create the capital. People are told that if they work really hard they will get promoted, but objectively all they are doing is exchanging a raise of a few dollars an hour and maybe an extra week of holidays for increased production from each individual. It is sort of like the idea that if you do something stupid for 'a chance to win X amount of money' (as in Edmonton's The Bear radio station's 'Really Tough Contest(s)'), it somehow becomes warranted. The whole issue revolves around the chance to have your situation improved, because if you don't have hope, you become lethargic, because usually there is no other internal or ontological feeling of satisfaction you get from increasing your output for the good of the company since it is, indeed, for the good of the company and not, as it were, for yourself and your fellow co-workers. I recall one instance when I was working a warehouse job and had been away for a few months in Asia. When they re-hired me after returning, I noticed they had posted a piece on the notification board entitled 'One Last Push' that talked about the parent company being on the brink of record profits and putting it out as if it would be felt as an achievement and be beneficial for everyone when, in fact, they reneged on promises to hire people full time and provide benefits saying that they had to 'tighten their belts', despite these apparent record profits:
First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another.
--Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
And it is, indeed, interesting that people become 'hooked' in such a way. They are promised that bigger is necessarily better, that achievement is defined in terms of wealth and capital rather than, for example, meritocratically.
But that still makes one wonder about this element of time that creeps in. In the 19th century, John Stuart Mill argued for the regulation of labour in terms of nine hour days, something unheard of at the time when most labourers worked upwards of eleven or twelve hour days to achieve what they required. But in this day and age there is really no reason for this. Last night, my Tanzanian friend talked about if he had a bit of capital back in Arusha, he could buy a tractor or harvester and do in a few days what it takes locals many weeks to do. And not with an eye to monopolizing the output of the community, but by teaching them how to become self-sufficient in terms of optimizing their labour output. The question becomes, then, what does one do with this newfound 'free time'.
Well, for one thing, I'm sure it would be nice for a lot of these people to save their children from having to do back-breaking labour in order for the family to survive. Having extra time to spend educating themselves would be highly beneficial as well. But these both fly in the face of imperialist tactics that attempt to keep people ignorant and keep cheap and/or free labour available by monopolizing people's time so they remain trapped in an unending chain of hard labour, coerced hard labour.
And, of course, above all of these abstract ideas of self-betterment, in the highly mobilized capitalist society we presently call our own, we could probably all use a few extra hours of sleep...
Showing posts with label ontology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ontology. Show all posts
Friday, August 19, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
Africa and Consciousness
I lasted less than 24 hours in Gaborone. It is something like a Johannesburg in the sense that a western business sense seems to have been ushered in, which is possibly justified by many opinions that Botswana has 'the fastest growing economy in Africa', or something like that. But what does it mean for an economy to grow?
When I was in Lesotho, the individual that I spent my time with and stayed with his family once said to me 'Lesotho is a poor country'. I asked him why he said that, and noted that the notion of 'poor' is based on a western model of GDPs and capital, but Lesotho is, in fact, a rich country in the fact that it has sufficient land for its population and has a very agrarian lifestyle. I told him that money with only get you so far, as you cannot eat it. Those who control land and food production are the ones that will be guaranteed survival, as Tolstoy so aptly noted in his allegory Ivan the Fool.
One of the things that has really come to the fore, however, and really made me understand the situation in Africa, that is, the social situation in Africa, is what I can only best sum up as:
"Regardless of whether it is a socio-political challenge created by the environment one lives in or a personal challenge created and implemented by one on oneself, it is only when survival challenges an individual that that individual becomes and remains conscious."
By that I mean I realize why I enjoy Africa (and 'the developing world', like during my travels in Asia) so much more than 'the west' is because people are forced to be conscious so that they may survive in a socio-economic environment where survival cannot be taken for granted, as it too often is in the affluent west.
One can think about it this way: if one knows that all one needs to do is 'enter the system' and they will basically be guaranteed eight hours a day five days a week doing whatever but, importantly, making more than enough money to survive, there is no reason for that person to change their ways, unless they feel that there is more to survival than simply being able to afford whatever basic needs and luxuries that they should require.
And this is a vicious cycle perpetuated by the capitalist mentality, and exemplified by the fact that the names on people's lips are no longer the Platos, Leonardo da Vincis, Max Plancks, and Alexander Flemings of the world, i.e. those that contributed to our collective well-being through theory and practice. Rather, it is the Bill Gates's, the David Beckhams, the Justin Biebers, the Johnny Depps, and the American Idol winners of the world, i.e. those with power (in whatever form) and money.
This shows the dramatic shift that has occurred in the past century where capital has usurped merit with regard to importance to the 'random individual'. And because of this, there is an abyss that has opened up before us because, as Marx said 150 years ago, capitalism, which is based on profit, cannot sustain itself, because eventually there are no new markets that can be exploited for profit. This may be a blip in human evolution where a few decades or a few centuries down the road we realize the pointlessness, uselessness, and stupidity of following a track that is based on vanity and personal acclaim over merit, theory, and socio-political sustainability. The human race is at a very interesting crossroads. It is of my humble opinion that the current situation can be summed up best by a quote from Patrick Stewart (as Captain Jean-Luc Picard) in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation:
"For us to go forward, the cycle must end."
When I was in Lesotho, the individual that I spent my time with and stayed with his family once said to me 'Lesotho is a poor country'. I asked him why he said that, and noted that the notion of 'poor' is based on a western model of GDPs and capital, but Lesotho is, in fact, a rich country in the fact that it has sufficient land for its population and has a very agrarian lifestyle. I told him that money with only get you so far, as you cannot eat it. Those who control land and food production are the ones that will be guaranteed survival, as Tolstoy so aptly noted in his allegory Ivan the Fool.
One of the things that has really come to the fore, however, and really made me understand the situation in Africa, that is, the social situation in Africa, is what I can only best sum up as:
"Regardless of whether it is a socio-political challenge created by the environment one lives in or a personal challenge created and implemented by one on oneself, it is only when survival challenges an individual that that individual becomes and remains conscious."
By that I mean I realize why I enjoy Africa (and 'the developing world', like during my travels in Asia) so much more than 'the west' is because people are forced to be conscious so that they may survive in a socio-economic environment where survival cannot be taken for granted, as it too often is in the affluent west.
One can think about it this way: if one knows that all one needs to do is 'enter the system' and they will basically be guaranteed eight hours a day five days a week doing whatever but, importantly, making more than enough money to survive, there is no reason for that person to change their ways, unless they feel that there is more to survival than simply being able to afford whatever basic needs and luxuries that they should require.
And this is a vicious cycle perpetuated by the capitalist mentality, and exemplified by the fact that the names on people's lips are no longer the Platos, Leonardo da Vincis, Max Plancks, and Alexander Flemings of the world, i.e. those that contributed to our collective well-being through theory and practice. Rather, it is the Bill Gates's, the David Beckhams, the Justin Biebers, the Johnny Depps, and the American Idol winners of the world, i.e. those with power (in whatever form) and money.
This shows the dramatic shift that has occurred in the past century where capital has usurped merit with regard to importance to the 'random individual'. And because of this, there is an abyss that has opened up before us because, as Marx said 150 years ago, capitalism, which is based on profit, cannot sustain itself, because eventually there are no new markets that can be exploited for profit. This may be a blip in human evolution where a few decades or a few centuries down the road we realize the pointlessness, uselessness, and stupidity of following a track that is based on vanity and personal acclaim over merit, theory, and socio-political sustainability. The human race is at a very interesting crossroads. It is of my humble opinion that the current situation can be summed up best by a quote from Patrick Stewart (as Captain Jean-Luc Picard) in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation:
"For us to go forward, the cycle must end."
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Yourself? Or Someone Like You?
I was fairly sure the above title (minus the punctuation) was the name of an album by some cliche band from my school years, but it took me a google search to see that it was the debut album of Matchbox 20. Not a big fan, but whatever.
Given that there are final exams coming up here in Cape Town, I was asked by an acquaintance of mine (I'd hardly call him a friend) to provide my services to help him tutor math to some students, because he had 'opened his own tutoring company', but appears to be severely restricted in what he is able to teach. Of course, he has already revealed to me that his intention is to eventually run a company where others do the tutoring for him and he takes his cut. Not surprising given the general global economic attitude that I have criticized numerous times already, and definitely not surprising if you knew the individual in question.
Anyway, after struggling to get a time when we could meet, we finally met this morning. She picked me up in her brand new BMW, and took me to her very large apartment with an amazing view over UCT so we could do a bit of math. We covered some amount of math, and in between we chatted a bit about our various backgrounds, academic and not. I asked her the usual question of 'if youre not interested, why take it?' to which I got the common answer 'first I feel its important to be 'educated' and second because my parents want it that way.' Given the amount of wealth that her parents seem to regularly endow her with (her family is from Joburg), I understand that she would probably want to please them, though perhaps a heart-to-heart wouldn't be such a bad thing. After the session, I departed and we agreed to get together tomorrow to continue.
She also passed on my number to a friend of hers who was also struggling with mathematics, and after a bit of a mix-up in terms of where we were meeting, she picked me up in her Polo and took me to her (and her parents) place that also seemed fairly large and well-endowed.
But the second individual was much more interesting than the first, as she had revealed to me that she REALLY didn't like doing the accounting stuff that she was learning to the point where she wished she could study something else. This was after I told her about my academic background and such. We did some math and also chatted, as I had done with the other one, but it soon became evident that this second one was really quite sharp. She talked about living 7 months in Hollywood during her gap year and seeing the qualitative differences between the homeless in either place, telling me that growing up in Cape Town, she shouldn't be too shocked to see homeless people per se, but the manner in which a lot of them were basically victims of drug addictions brought on by the 'Ferris Wheel of Shit' led a certain tragic air to their predicament.
After these exchanges I thought 'wow, she is a pretty amazing individual in so many ways,' and, as often happens, I began to daydream, in this case about the plausibility of some sort of relationship. Not so much because I thought that I had any sort of hope, but more so because she seemed like such a cool customer.
But as I thought about more and more, I thought about the vast difference in ages (she's probably 19, while Im... well... several years older). First I thought of it in terms of social taboo, but then I start to think about it in terms of a more existential critique. I started to think 'well if I (hypothetically speaking) truly 'loved' this individual, then surely it would be one of the most selfish things I could do to demand some form of binding relationship with her'. The reason for this was because on the one hand I would be depriving her of the manner in which she is able to go out into the world with a natural curiosity and come to her own opinions and interpretations about it. I've already had one of the most existentially full post-high-school periods that has allowed me to come to a lot of my own conclusions about the world, etc., and so it would seem that there would be a certain 'existential lopsidedness' to such a prospect. If you have young people of about the same age together, they are on similar footing, with curiosities about similar things and how they should be interpreted, but if the difference in ages is several years, and you plan to have an extended time together, then there is definitely a certain 'information imbalance', whether that information is 'wrong' or 'right'. Along with that would come a similarly lopsided interpretative nature to it (so it seems to me), because without that period of existential curiosity, you become heavily dependent on others to interpret the world for you, something, for example, that arises in the educational relationships between parents and children, such as, for example, the daughter in one of my recent posts putting her very young brother on the spot about the existence of God. And suddenly this stream of thought turned into a tributary of a main river.
Just as Kierkegaard explained, in my opinion in a very accurate and meaningful way, the element of 'faith' in religion is the major cornerstone. However, if you come to that faith due to someone else's 'teachings' or 'arguments', then your faith is not in God, but rather in this person; i.e. this person, and not 'God', is your god, because your belief is in this person's rendition being accurate, and not about God directly.
Applying this argument to the above scenario, it seemed that if I was to spend a fair amount of the future with someone a lot younger than me, then surely they would have to be a very strong individual in order not to begin to become 'like me' in terms of my interpretations of the world, and the things that I value, given my 'experience' in traveling the world, studying a number of academic disciplines, etc. And indeed, for those sheep-like minions who refuse or ignore the call to critically engage with their environment, instead taking whatever hegemonic interpretation of the situation as the correct one, what sort of claim do they have to a 'self'? Because there is a space between their corporeal bodies, and so they are, at the very least, physically different? Can we say that these people are actually unique individuals, or simply approximations to other beings, as we would see the difference between the outer features and behaviour of, say, two house cats, but in the end we group them into the general category 'cats' and the role they play in the home?
It is interesting to see how the radicalization of individualism, as seen, for example, in Ayn Rand's 'Objectivism', actually seems to end up coming full circle back to a very un-individualistic social reality, where the pursuit of 'individual happiness' and 'rational self-interest' ends up being a constant fight to occupy the same rungs of the same ladders, with no one stopping to consider that their 'individual' self-interest and happiness might be dependent on a less orthodox social strategy than whatever social algorithm happens to dominate the present day (for us, it would likely be something akin to 'schooling', 'specialized schooling/training' (e.g. university, technical institutes, trade schools, etc.,), career, house, family, 1.7 children, retirement with occasional jaunts to Mexico or Florida to lie on the beach for no real purpose except to demonstrate that you can, death).
In fact, one can already argue that Objectivism was criticized sufficiently over half a century before its inception by Nietzsche. One could argue that 'The Last Man' described in 'Zarathustra's Prologue' of Also Sprach Zarathustra, could represent a world that follows Objectivism:
I will speak unto them of the most contemptible thing: that, however, is the last man!"
And thus spake Zarathustra unto the people:
It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the germ of his highest hope.
Still is his soil rich enough for it. But that soil will one day be poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow thereon.
Alas! there cometh the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man - and the string of his bow will have unlearned to whizz!
I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: ye have still chaos in you.
Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.
Lo! I show you the Last Man.
"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" - so asketh the Last Man and blinketh.
The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the Last Man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the Last Man liveth longest.
"We have discovered happiness" - say the Last Man, and blink thereby.
They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one's neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth.
Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men!
A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.
One still worketh, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.
One no longer becometh poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wanteth to rule? Who still wanteth to obey? Both are too burdensome.
No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wanteth the same; everyone is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.
"Formerly all the world was insane," - say the subtlest of them, and blink thereby.
They are clever and know all that hath happened: so there is no end to their raillery. People still fall out, but are soon reconciled - otherwise it spoileth their stomachs.
They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.
"We have discovered happiness," - say the Last Man, and blink thereby. -
It is odd how this is, I must say; that the more people try to be different, the more they become like each other. But it is easy to see why this might be so, namely that they all have the same general goals, and there are only so many different permutations of how these goals can be reached. More risk may provide more benefit, but it usually leads to more loss; so instead of taking such a risk, too often it seems they just follow the well-worn path, leading to a highly similar behaviours, with highly similar paths, and, except for the lucky few, highly similar outcomes. Such is the price we pay for hegemony: our soil will one day be poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow thereon.
And in this way, it seems that where individuals are at different stages in their lives due to differences in age, culture, academics, or some other such matter (and this is in general, not just as a byproduct of my particular reflections about the hypothetical scenario above), Sting's words do indeed ring true, namely "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free".
Given that there are final exams coming up here in Cape Town, I was asked by an acquaintance of mine (I'd hardly call him a friend) to provide my services to help him tutor math to some students, because he had 'opened his own tutoring company', but appears to be severely restricted in what he is able to teach. Of course, he has already revealed to me that his intention is to eventually run a company where others do the tutoring for him and he takes his cut. Not surprising given the general global economic attitude that I have criticized numerous times already, and definitely not surprising if you knew the individual in question.
Anyway, after struggling to get a time when we could meet, we finally met this morning. She picked me up in her brand new BMW, and took me to her very large apartment with an amazing view over UCT so we could do a bit of math. We covered some amount of math, and in between we chatted a bit about our various backgrounds, academic and not. I asked her the usual question of 'if youre not interested, why take it?' to which I got the common answer 'first I feel its important to be 'educated' and second because my parents want it that way.' Given the amount of wealth that her parents seem to regularly endow her with (her family is from Joburg), I understand that she would probably want to please them, though perhaps a heart-to-heart wouldn't be such a bad thing. After the session, I departed and we agreed to get together tomorrow to continue.
She also passed on my number to a friend of hers who was also struggling with mathematics, and after a bit of a mix-up in terms of where we were meeting, she picked me up in her Polo and took me to her (and her parents) place that also seemed fairly large and well-endowed.
But the second individual was much more interesting than the first, as she had revealed to me that she REALLY didn't like doing the accounting stuff that she was learning to the point where she wished she could study something else. This was after I told her about my academic background and such. We did some math and also chatted, as I had done with the other one, but it soon became evident that this second one was really quite sharp. She talked about living 7 months in Hollywood during her gap year and seeing the qualitative differences between the homeless in either place, telling me that growing up in Cape Town, she shouldn't be too shocked to see homeless people per se, but the manner in which a lot of them were basically victims of drug addictions brought on by the 'Ferris Wheel of Shit' led a certain tragic air to their predicament.
After these exchanges I thought 'wow, she is a pretty amazing individual in so many ways,' and, as often happens, I began to daydream, in this case about the plausibility of some sort of relationship. Not so much because I thought that I had any sort of hope, but more so because she seemed like such a cool customer.
But as I thought about more and more, I thought about the vast difference in ages (she's probably 19, while Im... well... several years older). First I thought of it in terms of social taboo, but then I start to think about it in terms of a more existential critique. I started to think 'well if I (hypothetically speaking) truly 'loved' this individual, then surely it would be one of the most selfish things I could do to demand some form of binding relationship with her'. The reason for this was because on the one hand I would be depriving her of the manner in which she is able to go out into the world with a natural curiosity and come to her own opinions and interpretations about it. I've already had one of the most existentially full post-high-school periods that has allowed me to come to a lot of my own conclusions about the world, etc., and so it would seem that there would be a certain 'existential lopsidedness' to such a prospect. If you have young people of about the same age together, they are on similar footing, with curiosities about similar things and how they should be interpreted, but if the difference in ages is several years, and you plan to have an extended time together, then there is definitely a certain 'information imbalance', whether that information is 'wrong' or 'right'. Along with that would come a similarly lopsided interpretative nature to it (so it seems to me), because without that period of existential curiosity, you become heavily dependent on others to interpret the world for you, something, for example, that arises in the educational relationships between parents and children, such as, for example, the daughter in one of my recent posts putting her very young brother on the spot about the existence of God. And suddenly this stream of thought turned into a tributary of a main river.
Just as Kierkegaard explained, in my opinion in a very accurate and meaningful way, the element of 'faith' in religion is the major cornerstone. However, if you come to that faith due to someone else's 'teachings' or 'arguments', then your faith is not in God, but rather in this person; i.e. this person, and not 'God', is your god, because your belief is in this person's rendition being accurate, and not about God directly.
Applying this argument to the above scenario, it seemed that if I was to spend a fair amount of the future with someone a lot younger than me, then surely they would have to be a very strong individual in order not to begin to become 'like me' in terms of my interpretations of the world, and the things that I value, given my 'experience' in traveling the world, studying a number of academic disciplines, etc. And indeed, for those sheep-like minions who refuse or ignore the call to critically engage with their environment, instead taking whatever hegemonic interpretation of the situation as the correct one, what sort of claim do they have to a 'self'? Because there is a space between their corporeal bodies, and so they are, at the very least, physically different? Can we say that these people are actually unique individuals, or simply approximations to other beings, as we would see the difference between the outer features and behaviour of, say, two house cats, but in the end we group them into the general category 'cats' and the role they play in the home?
It is interesting to see how the radicalization of individualism, as seen, for example, in Ayn Rand's 'Objectivism', actually seems to end up coming full circle back to a very un-individualistic social reality, where the pursuit of 'individual happiness' and 'rational self-interest' ends up being a constant fight to occupy the same rungs of the same ladders, with no one stopping to consider that their 'individual' self-interest and happiness might be dependent on a less orthodox social strategy than whatever social algorithm happens to dominate the present day (for us, it would likely be something akin to 'schooling', 'specialized schooling/training' (e.g. university, technical institutes, trade schools, etc.,), career, house, family, 1.7 children, retirement with occasional jaunts to Mexico or Florida to lie on the beach for no real purpose except to demonstrate that you can, death).
In fact, one can already argue that Objectivism was criticized sufficiently over half a century before its inception by Nietzsche. One could argue that 'The Last Man' described in 'Zarathustra's Prologue' of Also Sprach Zarathustra, could represent a world that follows Objectivism:
I will speak unto them of the most contemptible thing: that, however, is the last man!"
And thus spake Zarathustra unto the people:
It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the germ of his highest hope.
Still is his soil rich enough for it. But that soil will one day be poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow thereon.
Alas! there cometh the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man - and the string of his bow will have unlearned to whizz!
I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: ye have still chaos in you.
Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.
Lo! I show you the Last Man.
"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" - so asketh the Last Man and blinketh.
The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the Last Man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the Last Man liveth longest.
"We have discovered happiness" - say the Last Man, and blink thereby.
They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one's neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth.
Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men!
A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.
One still worketh, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.
One no longer becometh poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wanteth to rule? Who still wanteth to obey? Both are too burdensome.
No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wanteth the same; everyone is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.
"Formerly all the world was insane," - say the subtlest of them, and blink thereby.
They are clever and know all that hath happened: so there is no end to their raillery. People still fall out, but are soon reconciled - otherwise it spoileth their stomachs.
They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.
"We have discovered happiness," - say the Last Man, and blink thereby. -
It is odd how this is, I must say; that the more people try to be different, the more they become like each other. But it is easy to see why this might be so, namely that they all have the same general goals, and there are only so many different permutations of how these goals can be reached. More risk may provide more benefit, but it usually leads to more loss; so instead of taking such a risk, too often it seems they just follow the well-worn path, leading to a highly similar behaviours, with highly similar paths, and, except for the lucky few, highly similar outcomes. Such is the price we pay for hegemony: our soil will one day be poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow thereon.
And in this way, it seems that where individuals are at different stages in their lives due to differences in age, culture, academics, or some other such matter (and this is in general, not just as a byproduct of my particular reflections about the hypothetical scenario above), Sting's words do indeed ring true, namely "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free".
Friday, May 6, 2011
Gender Bender (or Behind Closed Doors)
The beginning of the month often sees rooms, houses, properties, etc. change hands. And in the house that I am staying in, this followed accordingly. The most obvious (if you had read about my recent scenario involving death) new arrival would be the one filling up Danny's room, since given that it has a personal bathroom and kitchenette, it would provide the greatest amount of extra income to the landlady. Another individual arrived to fill another room and a third room was also on offer that would have prompted a re-shuffle (in terms of various people switching rooms), but for the 'unbelievability of the unknown'.
I don't know the whole story, but the individual who stayed in this room had done so for quite a long time (I've been told for possibly up to four years). He had his share of problems, being a drug addict, and having some very strange behavioural issues in terms of possible 'kleptomania', and there was some animosity towards him from one of the other individuals who had also been there long term. But the landlady told me that she didnt have a problem with him staying because on the one hand his personal issues weren't her business and on the other hand his mother always promptly transferred the full amount of the rent into the proper bank account at the beginning of every month. He was scheduled to arrive last Thursday or Friday to clear out his stuff, but it ended up being that he didnt actually arrive until late on Saturday. I was there at the time sharing a toke with Raymond (Rasta), and I had tried to convince him that we should check out what's happening at the pub, but he kept motioning to me that he was worried about leaving this guy at the house by himself should he decide to take something with him on the way out. But at the end of it all he relented and we left.
The next morning, I woke up to the sound of 'Holy shit! This is really not good!' and thought that perhaps we had made a mistake by leaving him alone and he had made off with something. But when I eventually dragged myself out of bed, one of my other roommates came up to me and said 'Check out the room! It's like Al-Qaeda has been staying there and let a bomb go off!' I thought it couldn't be that bad, since I'm usually fairly untidy when it comes to leaving clothes and stuff strewn about my floor and a mess of papers and books near and in my bed because of the myriad of projects that always seem to pull me this way and that, so I went to check on it and... wow.
There was an almost indescribable mess, with a giant mess of things strewn everywhere in and around the room. A giant pile of wood and plastic and various broken things in one corner, the bed in a disgusting state and covered with garbage, etc. There were also to ropes tied across the middle of the room, I imagine to hang his washing on. And it was a very small room. But that wasn't the most interesting thing.
It always interesting to know what goes on behind the closed doors of people who are very secretive, especially those who have various substance problems. For the first month I had stayed at the house, he seemed a fairly regular guy, though the only sight I ever had of his room was him squeezing the door open as little as possible, squeezing through it, and then when leaving, he would always have a hockey bag containing who knows what (two heads in a duffel bag, for all I knew), but he spent most of the second month apparently staying out with his mom near Bellville to be closer to work, so I hadnt seen him much lately. While I had been there, the landlady had always talked about a lot of things that had gone missing: dishes, a receipt booklet, various odds and ends here and there, but she was always adamant that even though she contained an extra key, she couldnt by law go in to check his room (another thing she told me was that because of recent legislation she couldnt by law kick non-paying tenants out without a long legal procedure, so, as with the things missing, she took the people who had failed to pay over the month of April in stride). So now we were all going to get a peek into this individual's weird little world.
Unsurprisingly, during the cleanup that followed over the coming days, most of the missing dishes were found (and put through a very rigorous washing process), the receipt book had been found, and many other missing things had shown up in the room of an apparent kleptomaniac. But now, surveying the room, the first thing that occurred to me was the overfull ashtray next to the bed. This in itself might not be particularly interesting but for the fact that many of those cigarettes were stained with lipstick. Then my eyes went to the mess on the floor where there sat numerous bottles of makeup products, colognes, perfumes, and who knows what else. You saw condom packages, tampon packages, women's underwear. The landlady had always had a rule 'no sleepovers, male or female' (though this rule was only very loosely adhered to by most of the tenants). So what had been going on there? How often had women been going in and out? How long of the four years had all this stuff been fossilized there?
Well, the speculative answer to a lot of these questions has to do with the the fact that it had already been revealed to me by the landlady that there was an instance when she had surprised him one day by catching him in a dress or some such (perhaps when he had to take a quick bathroom break) and he had immediately taken to his heels to seek the privacy of his room. So it seemed that, to at least some extent, the 'women' who had been visiting him were his effeminate alter egos. Though this could not (and still doesn't) explain what a male who likes to get regularly in touch with his feminine side, and in a rather pro-active way, requires condoms and female hygiene products for. Either there had been women there at various times (though it would be odd for him to keep 'hygiene products' around for her unless she had been there constantly, and no such individual had ever been seen to have entered or exited his room), or he had REALLY allowed his imagination to run wild.
The notion of gender has very interesting ontological connotations. Just like we might say that humans are such because of certain physiological or genotypical traits, so one might make the same assessment of gender. You are male if you have certain hormones, a Y-chromosome, certain anatomical essentials, etc. Similarly, you are female if you have certain hormones, two X chromosomes (and therefore polar bodies), certain anatomical essentials, etc. Then there are those that are often lumped into 'gender neutral' groups, such as those with Klinefelter's syndrome, those that have under-developed sex organs of both genders, various hormonal 'imbalances', etc. But just as we might say that to define a human being as 'a bag of bones' or 'a bag of DNA' is not particularly useful, so it might be said of gender. How are males and/or females 'normally' 'supposed to' or 'not supposed to' conduct themselves?
In my MA philosophy thesis, I wrote about how political notions of 'human freedom' are often defined by looking at the ontological definitions of 'humanness' as depicted by the theorist in question. What, aside from physiologically or genealogically speaking defines people as being human? Is it based on 'thinking'? 'Consciousness'? 'Productive capilities'? 'Hierarchical structure'? 'Socio-political structure'? Different answers imply different notions of political notions of freedom (so I have argued anyway).
But I believe a similar approach could be used to see what is behind gender stereotypes. If we talk about humanity in terms of its procreative needs, it leads to notions of 'heterosexuality', 'homosexuality', and 'bisexuality'. If we talk about humans in terms of 'thinking' or 'consciousness', which is the mark of the 'classic' and 'early modern philosophy', it turns into the perpetuation of stereotypes of women as intellectual socialites due to the egregious declarations that the patriarchy made about the general 'inability' of women to critical engage with and critically assess epistemic and intellectual pursuits. Note how women were basically treated during those times, and note that the hierarchical implications of these assessments are then sneaked in the back door to imply that women are fundamentally 'lower' because of their inability to engage with 'higher' forms of learning, as well as their biological 'closeness' to the children that they carry with them through the nine-month gestation period implying that their role is to 'create and maintain the family'.
But then a reassessment started to take place during the Romantic period when women started to show their intellectual worth through their ability to write many very important and very deeply insightful and philosophically relevant novels. The notion of the intellectual inferiority of women then took on a different tact that it was restricted to 'female' perceptions of the world, and was explained by the romanticization of women as storytellers and artists, etc. Eliot summarized it in 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' by repeatedly referring to 'the women who come and go talking of Michelangelo'. But still they were largely excluded from 'real' male pursuits like philosophy and the sciences. And still the bias became about a woman's productive capabilities: stereotyped as being more 'delicate' (and lacking the required levels of testosterone, apparently), they were restricted to 'light labour' if they were to be loosed from their traditional banishment to household labour in terms of 'the woman's place in the kitchen', etc.
When Marx arrived on the scene, and reinvented human ontology as being based on production in the physical realm rather than thinking in the intellectual realm. He spoke of the importance of female labour and, largely, the end of gender stereotypes with respect to production: we are now a species-being and we should further our species-capabilities through whatever means possible and quit squabbling about individual roles. And it has been this ontological modernization, in my opinion, that has been at the heart of gender modernization; I do not think that it is any secret that women who wish to be 'very' progressive in terms of gender must also be ontologically progressive, and, transitively, politically progressive, in terms of 'leaning more to the left', in some way or another (for example, my thesis speaks of Hannah Arendt's philosophy as being 'progressive' in this way, even though she always largely pooh-poohed socialism).
And so I believe we can take this lesson from history and ontology to define human beings first as human beings before we say that, being this or that gender, they must act in this or that manner. If this individual is curious about what it might be to live as a woman, then I believe he should be encouraged to do so, just as I believe John Howard Griffin made a bold and important move to live as a black.
And it just underlines what is the central tenet of my social-political theory, which has been derived from my numerous travels and engagements in countries around the world and could be at the heart of so much socio-political progress in terms of race, gender, and economic class, if only it could be universally adapted:
We must look at, see, and accept each other as human beings before we allow notions of ethnicity, gender, and other visual cues to creep in and corrupt our judgments.
I don't know the whole story, but the individual who stayed in this room had done so for quite a long time (I've been told for possibly up to four years). He had his share of problems, being a drug addict, and having some very strange behavioural issues in terms of possible 'kleptomania', and there was some animosity towards him from one of the other individuals who had also been there long term. But the landlady told me that she didnt have a problem with him staying because on the one hand his personal issues weren't her business and on the other hand his mother always promptly transferred the full amount of the rent into the proper bank account at the beginning of every month. He was scheduled to arrive last Thursday or Friday to clear out his stuff, but it ended up being that he didnt actually arrive until late on Saturday. I was there at the time sharing a toke with Raymond (Rasta), and I had tried to convince him that we should check out what's happening at the pub, but he kept motioning to me that he was worried about leaving this guy at the house by himself should he decide to take something with him on the way out. But at the end of it all he relented and we left.
The next morning, I woke up to the sound of 'Holy shit! This is really not good!' and thought that perhaps we had made a mistake by leaving him alone and he had made off with something. But when I eventually dragged myself out of bed, one of my other roommates came up to me and said 'Check out the room! It's like Al-Qaeda has been staying there and let a bomb go off!' I thought it couldn't be that bad, since I'm usually fairly untidy when it comes to leaving clothes and stuff strewn about my floor and a mess of papers and books near and in my bed because of the myriad of projects that always seem to pull me this way and that, so I went to check on it and... wow.
There was an almost indescribable mess, with a giant mess of things strewn everywhere in and around the room. A giant pile of wood and plastic and various broken things in one corner, the bed in a disgusting state and covered with garbage, etc. There were also to ropes tied across the middle of the room, I imagine to hang his washing on. And it was a very small room. But that wasn't the most interesting thing.
It always interesting to know what goes on behind the closed doors of people who are very secretive, especially those who have various substance problems. For the first month I had stayed at the house, he seemed a fairly regular guy, though the only sight I ever had of his room was him squeezing the door open as little as possible, squeezing through it, and then when leaving, he would always have a hockey bag containing who knows what (two heads in a duffel bag, for all I knew), but he spent most of the second month apparently staying out with his mom near Bellville to be closer to work, so I hadnt seen him much lately. While I had been there, the landlady had always talked about a lot of things that had gone missing: dishes, a receipt booklet, various odds and ends here and there, but she was always adamant that even though she contained an extra key, she couldnt by law go in to check his room (another thing she told me was that because of recent legislation she couldnt by law kick non-paying tenants out without a long legal procedure, so, as with the things missing, she took the people who had failed to pay over the month of April in stride). So now we were all going to get a peek into this individual's weird little world.
Unsurprisingly, during the cleanup that followed over the coming days, most of the missing dishes were found (and put through a very rigorous washing process), the receipt book had been found, and many other missing things had shown up in the room of an apparent kleptomaniac. But now, surveying the room, the first thing that occurred to me was the overfull ashtray next to the bed. This in itself might not be particularly interesting but for the fact that many of those cigarettes were stained with lipstick. Then my eyes went to the mess on the floor where there sat numerous bottles of makeup products, colognes, perfumes, and who knows what else. You saw condom packages, tampon packages, women's underwear. The landlady had always had a rule 'no sleepovers, male or female' (though this rule was only very loosely adhered to by most of the tenants). So what had been going on there? How often had women been going in and out? How long of the four years had all this stuff been fossilized there?
Well, the speculative answer to a lot of these questions has to do with the the fact that it had already been revealed to me by the landlady that there was an instance when she had surprised him one day by catching him in a dress or some such (perhaps when he had to take a quick bathroom break) and he had immediately taken to his heels to seek the privacy of his room. So it seemed that, to at least some extent, the 'women' who had been visiting him were his effeminate alter egos. Though this could not (and still doesn't) explain what a male who likes to get regularly in touch with his feminine side, and in a rather pro-active way, requires condoms and female hygiene products for. Either there had been women there at various times (though it would be odd for him to keep 'hygiene products' around for her unless she had been there constantly, and no such individual had ever been seen to have entered or exited his room), or he had REALLY allowed his imagination to run wild.
The notion of gender has very interesting ontological connotations. Just like we might say that humans are such because of certain physiological or genotypical traits, so one might make the same assessment of gender. You are male if you have certain hormones, a Y-chromosome, certain anatomical essentials, etc. Similarly, you are female if you have certain hormones, two X chromosomes (and therefore polar bodies), certain anatomical essentials, etc. Then there are those that are often lumped into 'gender neutral' groups, such as those with Klinefelter's syndrome, those that have under-developed sex organs of both genders, various hormonal 'imbalances', etc. But just as we might say that to define a human being as 'a bag of bones' or 'a bag of DNA' is not particularly useful, so it might be said of gender. How are males and/or females 'normally' 'supposed to' or 'not supposed to' conduct themselves?
In my MA philosophy thesis, I wrote about how political notions of 'human freedom' are often defined by looking at the ontological definitions of 'humanness' as depicted by the theorist in question. What, aside from physiologically or genealogically speaking defines people as being human? Is it based on 'thinking'? 'Consciousness'? 'Productive capilities'? 'Hierarchical structure'? 'Socio-political structure'? Different answers imply different notions of political notions of freedom (so I have argued anyway).
But I believe a similar approach could be used to see what is behind gender stereotypes. If we talk about humanity in terms of its procreative needs, it leads to notions of 'heterosexuality', 'homosexuality', and 'bisexuality'. If we talk about humans in terms of 'thinking' or 'consciousness', which is the mark of the 'classic' and 'early modern philosophy', it turns into the perpetuation of stereotypes of women as intellectual socialites due to the egregious declarations that the patriarchy made about the general 'inability' of women to critical engage with and critically assess epistemic and intellectual pursuits. Note how women were basically treated during those times, and note that the hierarchical implications of these assessments are then sneaked in the back door to imply that women are fundamentally 'lower' because of their inability to engage with 'higher' forms of learning, as well as their biological 'closeness' to the children that they carry with them through the nine-month gestation period implying that their role is to 'create and maintain the family'.
But then a reassessment started to take place during the Romantic period when women started to show their intellectual worth through their ability to write many very important and very deeply insightful and philosophically relevant novels. The notion of the intellectual inferiority of women then took on a different tact that it was restricted to 'female' perceptions of the world, and was explained by the romanticization of women as storytellers and artists, etc. Eliot summarized it in 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' by repeatedly referring to 'the women who come and go talking of Michelangelo'. But still they were largely excluded from 'real' male pursuits like philosophy and the sciences. And still the bias became about a woman's productive capabilities: stereotyped as being more 'delicate' (and lacking the required levels of testosterone, apparently), they were restricted to 'light labour' if they were to be loosed from their traditional banishment to household labour in terms of 'the woman's place in the kitchen', etc.
When Marx arrived on the scene, and reinvented human ontology as being based on production in the physical realm rather than thinking in the intellectual realm. He spoke of the importance of female labour and, largely, the end of gender stereotypes with respect to production: we are now a species-being and we should further our species-capabilities through whatever means possible and quit squabbling about individual roles. And it has been this ontological modernization, in my opinion, that has been at the heart of gender modernization; I do not think that it is any secret that women who wish to be 'very' progressive in terms of gender must also be ontologically progressive, and, transitively, politically progressive, in terms of 'leaning more to the left', in some way or another (for example, my thesis speaks of Hannah Arendt's philosophy as being 'progressive' in this way, even though she always largely pooh-poohed socialism).
And so I believe we can take this lesson from history and ontology to define human beings first as human beings before we say that, being this or that gender, they must act in this or that manner. If this individual is curious about what it might be to live as a woman, then I believe he should be encouraged to do so, just as I believe John Howard Griffin made a bold and important move to live as a black.
And it just underlines what is the central tenet of my social-political theory, which has been derived from my numerous travels and engagements in countries around the world and could be at the heart of so much socio-political progress in terms of race, gender, and economic class, if only it could be universally adapted:
We must look at, see, and accept each other as human beings before we allow notions of ethnicity, gender, and other visual cues to creep in and corrupt our judgments.
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