What an article from the NY Times!
I reproduce it here verbatim:
--
It's Not About You
David Brooks
Over the past few weeks, America’s colleges have sent another class of graduates off into the world. These graduates possess something of inestimable value. Nearly every sensible middle-aged person would give away all their money to be able to go back to age 22 and begin adulthood anew.
But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.
More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.
Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.
No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America. College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own.
Worst of all, they are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.
But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front.
College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.
Today’s graduates are also told to find their passion and then pursue their dreams. The implication is that they should find themselves first and then go off and live their quest. But, of course, very few people at age 22 or 24 can take an inward journey and come out having discovered a developed self.
Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life. A relative suffers from Alzheimer’s and a young woman feels called to help cure that disease. A young man works under a miserable boss and must develop management skills so his department can function. Another young woman finds herself confronted by an opportunity she never thought of in a job category she never imagined. This wasn’t in her plans, but this is where she can make her contribution.
Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.
The graduates are also told to pursue happiness and joy. But, of course, when you read a biography of someone you admire, it’s rarely the things that made them happy that compel your admiration. It’s the things they did to court unhappiness — the things they did that were arduous and miserable, which sometimes cost them friends and aroused hatred. It’s excellence, not happiness, that we admire most.
Finally, graduates are told to be independent-minded and to express their inner spirit. But, of course, doing your job well often means suppressing yourself. As Atul Gawande mentioned during his countercultural address last week at Harvard Medical School, being a good doctor often means being part of a team, following the rules of an institution, going down a regimented checklist.
Today’s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But, of course, as they age, they’ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.
--
Friday, June 03, 2011
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
On Men and Women, Part II
Some excerpts from Chapter VIII (Sociopsychology of the Sex War) from The Culture of Narcissism (Christopher Lasch):
It has been clear for some time that "chivalry is dead". The tradition of gallantry formerly masked and to some degree mitigated the organized oppression of women. While males monopolized political and economic power, they made their domination of women more palatable by surrounding it with an elaborate ritual of deference and politesse. They set themselves up as protectors of the weaker sex, and this cloying but useful fiction set limits to their capacity to exploit women through sheer physical force. The counterconvention of droit de seigneur, which justified the predatory exploits of the privileged classes against women socially inferior to themselves, nevertheless showed that the male sex at no time ceased to regard most women as fair game. The long history of rape and seduction, moreover, served as a reminder that animal strength remained the basis of masculine ascendancy, manifested here in its most direct and brutal form. Yet polite conventions, even when they were no more than a facade, provided women with ideological leverage in their struggle to domesticate the wildness and savagery of men. They surrounded essentially exploitative relationships with a network of reciprocal obligations, which if nothing else made exploitation easier to bear.
...
Democracy and feminism have now stripped the veil of courtly convention from the subordination of women, revealing the sexual antagonisms formerly concealed by the "feminine mystique". Denied illusions of comity, men and women find it more difficult than before to confront each other as friends and lovers, let alone as equals. As male supremacy becomes ideologically untenable, incapable of justifying itself as protection, men assert their domination more directly, in fantasies and occasionally in acts of raw violence. Thus the treatment of women in movies, according to one study, as shifted "from reverence to rape".
Women who abandon the security of well-defined though restrictive social roles have always exposed themselves to sexual exploitation, having surrendered the usual claims of respectability. Mary Wollstonecraft, attempting to live as a free woman, found herself brutally deserted by Gilbert Imlay. Later feminists forfeited the privileges of sex and middle-class origin when they campaigned for women's rights. Men reviled them publicly as sexless "she-men" and approached them privately as loose women. ...
...
What distinguishes the present time from the past is that defiance of sexual conventions less and less presents itself as a matter of individual choice, as it was for the pioneers of feminism. Since most of those conventions have already collapsed, even a woman who lays no claim to her rights nevertheless finds it diffiult to claim the traditional privileges of her sex.
...
All women share in the burdens as well as the benefits of "liberation", both of which can be summarized by saying that men no longer treat women as ladies.
...
Today women have dropped much of their sexual reserve. In the eyes of men, this makes them more accessible as sexual partners but also more threatening. Formerly men complained about women's lack of sexual response; now they find this response intimidating and agonize about their capacity to satisfy it. ... The famous Masters-Johnson report on female sexuality added to these anxieties by depicting women as sexually insatiable, inexhaustible in their capacity to experience orgasm after orgasm. ... Sexual "performance" thus becomes another weapon in the war between men and women; social inhibitions no longer prevent women from exploiting the tactical advantage which the current obsession with sexual measurement has given them.
...
Both men and women have come to approach personal relations with a heightened appreciation of their emotional risks. Determined to manipulate the emotions of others while protecting themselves against emotional injury, both sexes cultivate a protective shallowness, a cynical detachment they do not altogether feel but which soon becomes habitual and in any case embitters personal relations merely through its repeated profession. At the same time, people demand from personal relations the richness and intensity of a religious experience. ... The degradation of work and the impoverishment of communal life force people to turn to sexual excitement to satisfy all their emotional needs. ...
An easygoing, everyday contempt for the weaknesses of the other sex, institutionalized as folk wisdom concerning the emotional incompetence of men or the brainlessness of women, kept sexual enmity within bounds and prevented it from becoming an obsession.
Feminism and the ideology of intimacy have discredited the sexual stereotypes which kept women in their place but which also made it possible to acknowledge sexual antagonisms without raising it to the level of all-out warfare. Today the folklore of sexual differences and the acceptance of sexual friction survive only in the working class. Middle-class feminists envy the ability of working-class women to acknowledge that men get in their way without becoming man-haters. "These women are less angry at their men because they don't spend that much time with them," according to one observer. "Middle-class women (on the other hand) are the ones who were told men had to be their companions."
...
Not merely the cult of sexual companionship and "togetherness" but feminism itself has caused women to make new demands on men and to hate men when they fail to meet these demands. ...
The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliche that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals. Although her own actions, which violate the conventions of female passivity and thus appear to men as a form of aggression, help to call up animal-like actions in males, even her understanding of this dynamic does not make it any easier to make allowances for her adversary.
...
"You want too much," an older woman says to a younger one. "You aren't willing to compromise. Men will never be as sensitive or aware as women are. It's just not in their nature. So you have to get used to that and be satisfied with . . . either sexual satisfaction or theoretical intelligence or being loved and not understood or else being left alone to do the things you want to do."
A woman who takes feminism seriously, as a program that aims to put the relations between men and women on a new footing, can no longer accept such a definition of available alternatives without recognizing it as a form of surrender. The younger woman rightly replies that no one should settle for less than a combination of sex, compassion, and intelligent understanding. The attempt to implement these demands, however, exposes her to repeated disappointments, especially since men appear to find the demand for tenderness as threatening to their emotional security as the demand for sexual satisfaction. Thwarted passion in turn gives rise in women to the powerful rage ...
...
Women's rage against men originates not only in erotic disappointments or the consciousness of oppression but in a perception of marriage as the ultimate trap, the ultimate routine in a routinized society, the ultimate expression of the banality that pervades and suffocates modern life. ... "It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up, even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted." If the man protests that he is exhausted too, and that his "fascinating day" consists of drudgery and humiliation, his wife suspects that he wishes merely to give her domestic prison the appearance of a rose-covered cottage.
...
On the one hand, feminism aspires to change the relations between men and women so that women will no longer be forced into the role of "victim" or "shrew", in the words of Simone de Beauvoir. On the other hand, it often makes women more shrewish than ever in their daily encounters with men. This contradiction remains unavoidable as long as feminism insists that men oppress women and that this oppression is intolerable, at the same time urging women to approach men not simply as oppressors but as friends and lovers.
...
For many reasons, personal relations have become increasingly risky - most obviously, because they no longer carry any assurance of permanence. Men and women make extravagant demands on each other and experience irrational rage and hatred when their demands are not met. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that more and more people long for emotional detachment or "enjoy sex", as Hendin writes, "only in situations where they can define and limit the intensity of the relationship." A lesbian confesses, "The only men I've ever been able to enjoy sex with were men I didn't give a shit about. Then I could let go, because I didn't feel vulnerable."
...
The most prevalent form of escape from emotional complexity is promiscuity: the attempt to achieve a strict separation between sex and feeling. Here again, escape masquerades as liberation, regression as progress.
...
Enlightened authorities ... insist on the need to humanize sex by making it into a "total experience" instead of a mechanized performance; yet in the same breath they condemn the human emotions of jealousy and possessiveness and decry "romantic illusions". "Radical" therapeutic wisdom urges men and women to express their needs and wishes without reserve - since all needs and wishes have equal legitimacy - but warns them not to expect a single mate to satisfy them.
The humanistic critique of sexual "depersonalization" ... exhorts men and women to "get in touch with their feelings" but encourages them to make "resolutions about freedom and 'non-possessiveness,'" as Ingrid Bengis writes, which "tear the very heart out of intimacy."
...
Today men and women seek escape from emotion not only because they have suffered too many wounds from emotion but because they experience their own inner impulses as intolerably urgent and menacing. ... it is the very character of those needs (and of the defenses erected against them) which gives rise to the belief that they cannot be satisfied in heterosexual relations - perhaps should not be satisfied in any form - and which therefore prompts people to withdraw from intense emotional encounters.
Instinctual desires always threaten psychic equilibrium and for this reason can never be given direct expression. In our society, however, they present themselves as intolerably menacing, in part because the collapse of authority has removed so many of the external prohibitions against the expression of dangerous impulses. The superego can no longer ally itself, in its battle against impulse, with outside authorities. It has to rely almost entirely on its own resources, and these too have diminished in their effectiveness.
...
The narcissist feels consumed by his own appetites. ... He longs to free himself from his own hunger and rage, to achieve a calm detachment beyond emotion, and to outgrow his dependence on others. He longs for the indifference to human relationships and to life itself that would enable him to acknowledge its passing in Kurt Vonnegut's laconic phrase, "So it goes," which so aptly expresses the ultimate aspiration of the psychiatric seeker.
But although the psychological man of our times frightens himself with the intensity of his inner needs, the needs of others appall him no less than his own. One reason the demands he inadvertently imposes on others make him uneasy is that they may justify others in making demands on himself Men especially fear the demands of women, not only because women no longer hesitate to press them but because men find it so difficult to imagine an emotional need that does not wish to consume whatever it seizes on.
Women today ask for two things in their relations with men: sexual satisfaction and tenderness. Whether separately or in combination, both demands seem to convey to many males the same message - that women are voracious, insatiable.
...
Whereas the resentment of women against men for the most part has solid roots in the discrimination and sexual danger to which women are constantly exposed, the resentment of men against women, when men still control most of the power and wealth in society yet feel themselves threatened on every hand - intimidated, emasculated - appears deeply irrational, and for that reason not likely to be appeased by changes in feminist tactics designed to reassure men that liberated women threaten no one.
...
The abolition of sexual tensions is an unworthy goal in any case; the point is to live with them more gracefully than we have lived with them in the past.
(to be continued)
It has been clear for some time that "chivalry is dead". The tradition of gallantry formerly masked and to some degree mitigated the organized oppression of women. While males monopolized political and economic power, they made their domination of women more palatable by surrounding it with an elaborate ritual of deference and politesse. They set themselves up as protectors of the weaker sex, and this cloying but useful fiction set limits to their capacity to exploit women through sheer physical force. The counterconvention of droit de seigneur, which justified the predatory exploits of the privileged classes against women socially inferior to themselves, nevertheless showed that the male sex at no time ceased to regard most women as fair game. The long history of rape and seduction, moreover, served as a reminder that animal strength remained the basis of masculine ascendancy, manifested here in its most direct and brutal form. Yet polite conventions, even when they were no more than a facade, provided women with ideological leverage in their struggle to domesticate the wildness and savagery of men. They surrounded essentially exploitative relationships with a network of reciprocal obligations, which if nothing else made exploitation easier to bear.
...
Democracy and feminism have now stripped the veil of courtly convention from the subordination of women, revealing the sexual antagonisms formerly concealed by the "feminine mystique". Denied illusions of comity, men and women find it more difficult than before to confront each other as friends and lovers, let alone as equals. As male supremacy becomes ideologically untenable, incapable of justifying itself as protection, men assert their domination more directly, in fantasies and occasionally in acts of raw violence. Thus the treatment of women in movies, according to one study, as shifted "from reverence to rape".
Women who abandon the security of well-defined though restrictive social roles have always exposed themselves to sexual exploitation, having surrendered the usual claims of respectability. Mary Wollstonecraft, attempting to live as a free woman, found herself brutally deserted by Gilbert Imlay. Later feminists forfeited the privileges of sex and middle-class origin when they campaigned for women's rights. Men reviled them publicly as sexless "she-men" and approached them privately as loose women. ...
...
What distinguishes the present time from the past is that defiance of sexual conventions less and less presents itself as a matter of individual choice, as it was for the pioneers of feminism. Since most of those conventions have already collapsed, even a woman who lays no claim to her rights nevertheless finds it diffiult to claim the traditional privileges of her sex.
...
All women share in the burdens as well as the benefits of "liberation", both of which can be summarized by saying that men no longer treat women as ladies.
...
Today women have dropped much of their sexual reserve. In the eyes of men, this makes them more accessible as sexual partners but also more threatening. Formerly men complained about women's lack of sexual response; now they find this response intimidating and agonize about their capacity to satisfy it. ... The famous Masters-Johnson report on female sexuality added to these anxieties by depicting women as sexually insatiable, inexhaustible in their capacity to experience orgasm after orgasm. ... Sexual "performance" thus becomes another weapon in the war between men and women; social inhibitions no longer prevent women from exploiting the tactical advantage which the current obsession with sexual measurement has given them.
...
Both men and women have come to approach personal relations with a heightened appreciation of their emotional risks. Determined to manipulate the emotions of others while protecting themselves against emotional injury, both sexes cultivate a protective shallowness, a cynical detachment they do not altogether feel but which soon becomes habitual and in any case embitters personal relations merely through its repeated profession. At the same time, people demand from personal relations the richness and intensity of a religious experience. ... The degradation of work and the impoverishment of communal life force people to turn to sexual excitement to satisfy all their emotional needs. ...
An easygoing, everyday contempt for the weaknesses of the other sex, institutionalized as folk wisdom concerning the emotional incompetence of men or the brainlessness of women, kept sexual enmity within bounds and prevented it from becoming an obsession.
Feminism and the ideology of intimacy have discredited the sexual stereotypes which kept women in their place but which also made it possible to acknowledge sexual antagonisms without raising it to the level of all-out warfare. Today the folklore of sexual differences and the acceptance of sexual friction survive only in the working class. Middle-class feminists envy the ability of working-class women to acknowledge that men get in their way without becoming man-haters. "These women are less angry at their men because they don't spend that much time with them," according to one observer. "Middle-class women (on the other hand) are the ones who were told men had to be their companions."
...
Not merely the cult of sexual companionship and "togetherness" but feminism itself has caused women to make new demands on men and to hate men when they fail to meet these demands. ...
The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliche that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals. Although her own actions, which violate the conventions of female passivity and thus appear to men as a form of aggression, help to call up animal-like actions in males, even her understanding of this dynamic does not make it any easier to make allowances for her adversary.
...
"You want too much," an older woman says to a younger one. "You aren't willing to compromise. Men will never be as sensitive or aware as women are. It's just not in their nature. So you have to get used to that and be satisfied with . . . either sexual satisfaction or theoretical intelligence or being loved and not understood or else being left alone to do the things you want to do."
A woman who takes feminism seriously, as a program that aims to put the relations between men and women on a new footing, can no longer accept such a definition of available alternatives without recognizing it as a form of surrender. The younger woman rightly replies that no one should settle for less than a combination of sex, compassion, and intelligent understanding. The attempt to implement these demands, however, exposes her to repeated disappointments, especially since men appear to find the demand for tenderness as threatening to their emotional security as the demand for sexual satisfaction. Thwarted passion in turn gives rise in women to the powerful rage ...
...
Women's rage against men originates not only in erotic disappointments or the consciousness of oppression but in a perception of marriage as the ultimate trap, the ultimate routine in a routinized society, the ultimate expression of the banality that pervades and suffocates modern life. ... "It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up, even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted." If the man protests that he is exhausted too, and that his "fascinating day" consists of drudgery and humiliation, his wife suspects that he wishes merely to give her domestic prison the appearance of a rose-covered cottage.
...
On the one hand, feminism aspires to change the relations between men and women so that women will no longer be forced into the role of "victim" or "shrew", in the words of Simone de Beauvoir. On the other hand, it often makes women more shrewish than ever in their daily encounters with men. This contradiction remains unavoidable as long as feminism insists that men oppress women and that this oppression is intolerable, at the same time urging women to approach men not simply as oppressors but as friends and lovers.
...
For many reasons, personal relations have become increasingly risky - most obviously, because they no longer carry any assurance of permanence. Men and women make extravagant demands on each other and experience irrational rage and hatred when their demands are not met. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that more and more people long for emotional detachment or "enjoy sex", as Hendin writes, "only in situations where they can define and limit the intensity of the relationship." A lesbian confesses, "The only men I've ever been able to enjoy sex with were men I didn't give a shit about. Then I could let go, because I didn't feel vulnerable."
...
The most prevalent form of escape from emotional complexity is promiscuity: the attempt to achieve a strict separation between sex and feeling. Here again, escape masquerades as liberation, regression as progress.
...
Enlightened authorities ... insist on the need to humanize sex by making it into a "total experience" instead of a mechanized performance; yet in the same breath they condemn the human emotions of jealousy and possessiveness and decry "romantic illusions". "Radical" therapeutic wisdom urges men and women to express their needs and wishes without reserve - since all needs and wishes have equal legitimacy - but warns them not to expect a single mate to satisfy them.
The humanistic critique of sexual "depersonalization" ... exhorts men and women to "get in touch with their feelings" but encourages them to make "resolutions about freedom and 'non-possessiveness,'" as Ingrid Bengis writes, which "tear the very heart out of intimacy."
...
Today men and women seek escape from emotion not only because they have suffered too many wounds from emotion but because they experience their own inner impulses as intolerably urgent and menacing. ... it is the very character of those needs (and of the defenses erected against them) which gives rise to the belief that they cannot be satisfied in heterosexual relations - perhaps should not be satisfied in any form - and which therefore prompts people to withdraw from intense emotional encounters.
Instinctual desires always threaten psychic equilibrium and for this reason can never be given direct expression. In our society, however, they present themselves as intolerably menacing, in part because the collapse of authority has removed so many of the external prohibitions against the expression of dangerous impulses. The superego can no longer ally itself, in its battle against impulse, with outside authorities. It has to rely almost entirely on its own resources, and these too have diminished in their effectiveness.
...
The narcissist feels consumed by his own appetites. ... He longs to free himself from his own hunger and rage, to achieve a calm detachment beyond emotion, and to outgrow his dependence on others. He longs for the indifference to human relationships and to life itself that would enable him to acknowledge its passing in Kurt Vonnegut's laconic phrase, "So it goes," which so aptly expresses the ultimate aspiration of the psychiatric seeker.
But although the psychological man of our times frightens himself with the intensity of his inner needs, the needs of others appall him no less than his own. One reason the demands he inadvertently imposes on others make him uneasy is that they may justify others in making demands on himself Men especially fear the demands of women, not only because women no longer hesitate to press them but because men find it so difficult to imagine an emotional need that does not wish to consume whatever it seizes on.
Women today ask for two things in their relations with men: sexual satisfaction and tenderness. Whether separately or in combination, both demands seem to convey to many males the same message - that women are voracious, insatiable.
...
Whereas the resentment of women against men for the most part has solid roots in the discrimination and sexual danger to which women are constantly exposed, the resentment of men against women, when men still control most of the power and wealth in society yet feel themselves threatened on every hand - intimidated, emasculated - appears deeply irrational, and for that reason not likely to be appeased by changes in feminist tactics designed to reassure men that liberated women threaten no one.
...
The abolition of sexual tensions is an unworthy goal in any case; the point is to live with them more gracefully than we have lived with them in the past.
(to be continued)
Monday, May 30, 2011
On Men and Women
Women are not the same as men.
They are the females of the mammalian species Homo Sapiens, in case one needs to be reminded.
They have distinct bodies, which have distinct processes, which have distinct hormonal rhythms.
They have a distinct biological role, and that biological role has defined to a very great extent the social and moral restrictions placed on them.
Of course there are "double standards" when it comes to male and female sexuality. "Double Standard" assumes a pejorative and hypocritical stance, whereas a more neutral phrase would be "distinct standard".
These distinctions in social and moral restrictions can be summarily brushed aside as unnatural and unfair only if one does not understand their evolutionary bases.
...
A woman is expected to act more modest socially. Her modesty has traditionally been her shield against unwanted male advances. It signals that she is not easy, and that there are going to be commitments and investments and social negotiations before a man is to even attempt to impregnate her.
A woman is "free" to disregard this traditional guideline of modesty just as someone in Iowa is free to not wear a helmet while riding a motorcycle. There is going to be increased risk, and society as a whole is going to have to pay for undesirable consequences when they occur. Divorces, night patrolling, care of fatherless children, termination of pregnancies, sexual harassment regulatory overheads, matrimonial litigation, all are significant economic costs which traditional societies avoided by having strict rules for women.
Many of those rules caused hardship to free thinking women, who were intelligent enough to make wise sexual decisions and didn't need to be overseen. And it is an interesting facet of law and morality that they are both wide-ranging and do not account for individual differences.
All sexual morality is the consequence of the biological facts of a woman being a female mammal requiring protection and support while she gives birth to and brings up the offspring and thus helps to propagate the genes of the father. There may be idiosyncrasies such as genital mutilation of females in certain societies, but then there are such idiosyncrasies related to men as well (e.g. circumcision).
Females and males are sexually unequal, and always will be. This fact can be consciously disregarded, but reality has a way of catching up in a hard way if you ignore it long enough.
...
The other arena of the so-called "double standards" is leadership.
Traditionally, power and leadership has been synonymous with readiness to engage in conflict. And to this day, conflict can quickly escalate into insults, ruthless negotiations, property disputes, physical violence, warfare. Armies and police forces all over the world are still predominantly male. It is no wonder that women military leaders have been conspicuous by their non-existence. There have been some notable female heads of state, but again, the vast majority of rulers have been men.
...
Coming to white collar environments, can a woman be a leader of men? The conflicts in these environments are not physically violent, but they do require a certain "toughness", an insensitivity (not blindness) to others' suffering and emotional states (ref, mass layoffs), and competitiveness.
A woman in a position which requires ruthlessness will understandably have to prove herself as being "man" enough. A man doesn't have to prove himself capable of ruthlessness, it is assumed that he is, by virtue of his gender. On the other hand, it is a fair question to ask of a woman leader whether she has got the requisite "guts" and "balls".
...
To what extent are traditional morality and social restrictions related to women still relevant? And let it not be thought that it is men (or only men) who subject women to the "rules". In fact most men who are not socially invested in her well-being would like her, for obvious reasons, to be more promiscuous and available and skimpily dressed and so on. Women have been brainwashed to think that "men" are restricting their sexual freedom, when factually speaking, societies (both men and women) have evolved these morals and rules to avoid hardship and a breakdown of the community.
In modern urban settings, the breakdown of the community is a non-factor, the community not being there in the first place. Similarly, sexual morality, being a communally driven phenomenon, is relatively non-existent. Hence, in a metro, a woman is, more or less, free to do what she wants.
But, there is a caveat.
Because an atmosphere of amorality and lack of community does not equate an atmosphere of implicit safety (in fact it is quite the opposite), increasingly vicious forms of women-friendly legislation have been put in place in most modern societies. Presumption of guilt is quite widespread when a woman complains against a man for some sexual or matrimonial indiscretion.
...
Equality before law is another topic of debate. No society treats all its inhabitants equally, even formally speaking. Illegal immigrants do not have the rights granted to a citizen. There is affirmative action for various classes of underprivileged people. Certain jobs require youthfulness. Most jobs require suitable credentials. Only high-net-worth individuals can invest in hedge funds.
It is politically correct to say that one must not discriminate against a particular race, income class, gender, and so on.
Most feminists I have talked to, or listened to, are not in favor of equality before the law. They would rather have preferential treatment for women, because they are the "oppressed" class. In most modern societies, laws favoring women vastly outnumber laws favoring men (if the latter at all exist).
I am of the firm opinion that one can't have it both ways. Either admit that women (as a class) need protection, and that they are more vulnerable to abuse. Or admit that women are equals, and that they do not need protection or special treatment. In the first case, a special right (or protection) will have to be accompanied by certain responsibilities on part of women. In the second, women can do what they want, but they had better take care of themselves when shit hits the fan and not run to the "society" for taking care of the fatherless child, or to men for "alimony" and "maintenance", or to judges for "bail based on gender".
(to be continued)
They are the females of the mammalian species Homo Sapiens, in case one needs to be reminded.
They have distinct bodies, which have distinct processes, which have distinct hormonal rhythms.
They have a distinct biological role, and that biological role has defined to a very great extent the social and moral restrictions placed on them.
Of course there are "double standards" when it comes to male and female sexuality. "Double Standard" assumes a pejorative and hypocritical stance, whereas a more neutral phrase would be "distinct standard".
These distinctions in social and moral restrictions can be summarily brushed aside as unnatural and unfair only if one does not understand their evolutionary bases.
...
A woman is expected to act more modest socially. Her modesty has traditionally been her shield against unwanted male advances. It signals that she is not easy, and that there are going to be commitments and investments and social negotiations before a man is to even attempt to impregnate her.
A woman is "free" to disregard this traditional guideline of modesty just as someone in Iowa is free to not wear a helmet while riding a motorcycle. There is going to be increased risk, and society as a whole is going to have to pay for undesirable consequences when they occur. Divorces, night patrolling, care of fatherless children, termination of pregnancies, sexual harassment regulatory overheads, matrimonial litigation, all are significant economic costs which traditional societies avoided by having strict rules for women.
Many of those rules caused hardship to free thinking women, who were intelligent enough to make wise sexual decisions and didn't need to be overseen. And it is an interesting facet of law and morality that they are both wide-ranging and do not account for individual differences.
All sexual morality is the consequence of the biological facts of a woman being a female mammal requiring protection and support while she gives birth to and brings up the offspring and thus helps to propagate the genes of the father. There may be idiosyncrasies such as genital mutilation of females in certain societies, but then there are such idiosyncrasies related to men as well (e.g. circumcision).
Females and males are sexually unequal, and always will be. This fact can be consciously disregarded, but reality has a way of catching up in a hard way if you ignore it long enough.
...
The other arena of the so-called "double standards" is leadership.
Traditionally, power and leadership has been synonymous with readiness to engage in conflict. And to this day, conflict can quickly escalate into insults, ruthless negotiations, property disputes, physical violence, warfare. Armies and police forces all over the world are still predominantly male. It is no wonder that women military leaders have been conspicuous by their non-existence. There have been some notable female heads of state, but again, the vast majority of rulers have been men.
...
Coming to white collar environments, can a woman be a leader of men? The conflicts in these environments are not physically violent, but they do require a certain "toughness", an insensitivity (not blindness) to others' suffering and emotional states (ref, mass layoffs), and competitiveness.
A woman in a position which requires ruthlessness will understandably have to prove herself as being "man" enough. A man doesn't have to prove himself capable of ruthlessness, it is assumed that he is, by virtue of his gender. On the other hand, it is a fair question to ask of a woman leader whether she has got the requisite "guts" and "balls".
...
To what extent are traditional morality and social restrictions related to women still relevant? And let it not be thought that it is men (or only men) who subject women to the "rules". In fact most men who are not socially invested in her well-being would like her, for obvious reasons, to be more promiscuous and available and skimpily dressed and so on. Women have been brainwashed to think that "men" are restricting their sexual freedom, when factually speaking, societies (both men and women) have evolved these morals and rules to avoid hardship and a breakdown of the community.
In modern urban settings, the breakdown of the community is a non-factor, the community not being there in the first place. Similarly, sexual morality, being a communally driven phenomenon, is relatively non-existent. Hence, in a metro, a woman is, more or less, free to do what she wants.
But, there is a caveat.
Because an atmosphere of amorality and lack of community does not equate an atmosphere of implicit safety (in fact it is quite the opposite), increasingly vicious forms of women-friendly legislation have been put in place in most modern societies. Presumption of guilt is quite widespread when a woman complains against a man for some sexual or matrimonial indiscretion.
...
Equality before law is another topic of debate. No society treats all its inhabitants equally, even formally speaking. Illegal immigrants do not have the rights granted to a citizen. There is affirmative action for various classes of underprivileged people. Certain jobs require youthfulness. Most jobs require suitable credentials. Only high-net-worth individuals can invest in hedge funds.
It is politically correct to say that one must not discriminate against a particular race, income class, gender, and so on.
Most feminists I have talked to, or listened to, are not in favor of equality before the law. They would rather have preferential treatment for women, because they are the "oppressed" class. In most modern societies, laws favoring women vastly outnumber laws favoring men (if the latter at all exist).
I am of the firm opinion that one can't have it both ways. Either admit that women (as a class) need protection, and that they are more vulnerable to abuse. Or admit that women are equals, and that they do not need protection or special treatment. In the first case, a special right (or protection) will have to be accompanied by certain responsibilities on part of women. In the second, women can do what they want, but they had better take care of themselves when shit hits the fan and not run to the "society" for taking care of the fatherless child, or to men for "alimony" and "maintenance", or to judges for "bail based on gender".
(to be continued)
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Fall in IT, or Rise
The Hindu recently published a somewhat provocative article titled "Are IT people the fall guys?" written by one who has been working in the IT sector for seven years.
The article, and the many comments and subsequent "Letters to the Editor" (here, here and here), express varied viewpoints about the Knowledge Industry versus traditional occupations.
The IT and private Services sector, just like the salaried government workers of the last century, is the new middle class of India. It was easy to predict the worldview of the middle class then, and it is easy to do so now. The parameters have changed slightly, but as before, success for a middle class person is achieved by hard work, listening to the boss, subservience, patience, and following the rules. Thrift is no longer a virtue, though.
The parents of most people in the IT sector belong to the salaried and middle classes. Such parents tried to make sure their children studied hard, did not indulge in immorality, got a degree from a college, and understood the value of money. Risk-taking was not encouraged.
Here is my unsolicited advice to the frustrated IT employee, the author of the above article being one.
Make the Gods proud that you inhabit the earth.
The article, and the many comments and subsequent "Letters to the Editor" (here, here and here), express varied viewpoints about the Knowledge Industry versus traditional occupations.
The IT and private Services sector, just like the salaried government workers of the last century, is the new middle class of India. It was easy to predict the worldview of the middle class then, and it is easy to do so now. The parameters have changed slightly, but as before, success for a middle class person is achieved by hard work, listening to the boss, subservience, patience, and following the rules. Thrift is no longer a virtue, though.
The parents of most people in the IT sector belong to the salaried and middle classes. Such parents tried to make sure their children studied hard, did not indulge in immorality, got a degree from a college, and understood the value of money. Risk-taking was not encouraged.
Here is my unsolicited advice to the frustrated IT employee, the author of the above article being one.
- Read something other than popular fiction and popular non-fiction. Read the classics, or the Nobel winners. Harry Potter is not a book for adults.
- Travel to small nondescript towns and villages for a vacation, or to a famous university town, not all the time to Goa or Disneyland.
- Take the stairs in the office. All the time.
- Shun cheap beer, company party or no company party.
- Keep a dumb phone.
- Fuckin' boycott mainstream cinema, fast food, red bull, IPL and assorted drugs.
- Throw out the telly.
- Cook something simple everyday. And walk a mile after dinner.
- Be a seven-eleven person. Wake up by seven, and go to bed by eleven. Let it be something worthy, or beautiful which keeps you awake at night, not a bad routine.
- Drink lots of water, green tea, unsweetened juice. Regard Coke as a load of cock, and Sprite as shite.
- Learn investing and money management.
- On a free day, visit a police station or a hospital or a court. It will be much more memorable and insightful than visiting the same stores in the mall.
- Subscribe to a proper magazine, not Flimfare or Cosmo or some other ad-infested joke.
- Create something. Write, even if just a review. Photograph. Paint. Play.
- If you have nothing to do on a rainy day, do nothing. Watch the rain. Don't log on to facebook and start chatting, for fuck's sake. Show your middle finger to Zuckerberg and Zinga and ZooZoos.
- Vote: Local, State and Nation. Know your representatives at all levels. Most don't even know their MP.
- Spell, and punctuate. Diss dis'ing.
- If you don't know enough about an issue, then study. First learn, and then form an opinion. Be it global warming, GM foods, vanishing tigers or turtles, Pakistan, Corruption, Reservations, Feminism. These are complex issues, and your uninformed opinion doesn't count.
- Be politically incorrect at times. Say something authentic which drops a bomb on a pretentious polite conversation. Question deeply, and don't just troll.
- Understand that your boss is as much a victim of you, as you are a victim of him. Both of you are victims of economic forces much beyond your control. Stop whining and start understanding.
- Look at the faces of your housekeeping staff, the security guards, the waiters, the auto-wallahs, the beggars, the vegetable sellers, the checkout clerks, the drivers. You don't have to respond, or to smile. But look! Don't remain in your cocoon.
- Simplify your gadget and media heavy life.
- Be a man, or a woman. Not a kid or an adolescent or worse. Let not working in the service industry make you facile or servile or infantile.
- Know your heritage, history and heretics.
Make the Gods proud that you inhabit the earth.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
The Value of Money
The concept of money is one of the most important inventions in humanity. It is hard to overstate what money enables by virtue of its near-universal acceptability.
Money is a valid claim only insofar its acceptability is mandated by law. It is an institution.
Money extends a trade in time. You hand over something of real value, and in return, you are given money, a claim on humanity for the future.
To hand over money to someone and expect something of value in return is an implicit celebration of this institution.
Money is the true "sanchit karma": the accumulated value, in hard numbers, of your past deeds or pedigree.
Money enables, in future. And its enable-ability is guaranteed. And therein lies the key to its charm. It is a lasso to overwhelm time. To have a million in the bank is as good as walking with an army of bodyguards, slaves, doctors, lawyers, and so on.
To have money in one's pocket is to have a command over one's environment.
Someone who shuns money, or regards its pursuit as mistaken, usually does not produce something of value for the others. Such a person has an unjustified sense of entitlement over others. Beware of the man who seeks to pick your pocket by calling its contents worthless.
Since it is a bulwark against the vagaries of time, there is no limit to how much more money one wants. As long as immortality cannot be bought, no amount of money is ever going to be enough.
The difference between greed and ambition is simple: Greed involves seeking unjust rewards. To want to steal, rob, manipulate, hoodwink, is to be greedy. To work hard, plan carefully, to want to grow, to produce something of value to others, is ambition.
Money is a form of power over others which others cannot wriggle out of. Influence, reputation, beauty are also forms of power, in that they lead to (mostly) a willing subservience. But non-monetary forms of power are neither easy to possess, nor easy to maintain.
There is the valid criticism that the pursuit of money can become self-serving, an end in itself. I find that criticism naive. Money is obviously an end in itself till it is spent. Castigating someone for only collecting money and not spending it all within the month, is to berate him for thinking further ahead than most people. Maybe he is more afraid of mortality than others, maybe he wishes to do something great for society or enable a grand sense of security for his family.
To shun money (ref Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa) because greed is a base instinct, is to throw out the baby with the bath water. But this is a general trait, more pronounced in the East. To forget ambition, love and belonging, to see the negatives of lust, greed, attachment, and to thereby condemn women, money, relationships, and to then exhort celibacy, poverty and detachment. Humanity continues and flourishes not because of the renunciates, but because of those who struggle with, and try to balance, the rewards and sorrows of their instincts.
Of course the institution of money is corrupt, like any other institution. Of course inflation is a bit of a fraud, of course there is manipulation in commodities and in the stock markets, but the battle between greed and law will continue as long as we are human. What is the alternative? Money is here to stay. Only a progressive evolution of our institutions is our choice.
Since it is such an important institution, there is a class of industry which deals solely with the management of money and associated paper. The Financial Services Industry. It is a complex question whether they add real value to society. Certainly there are a lot of very rich people in this sector, with nary an accomplishment against their name except having made good bets due to privileged access to information, more efficient processing of money-related information, having found arbitrage opportunities, and having found interesting loopholes in the system.
Are the money-experts the baron-robbers of modern times who go away laughing from plundered cities? There is a general agreement that many of them need to be firmly reined in. But one of the strangest conundrums is: anyone who knows or understands enough about money to rein them in, joins hands with them. To thwart this very real nexus of regulators, state, financiers, requires a person of Jesus' moral strength who has memorized and understood the scriptures of Mammon and who has the warfare skills of Clausewitz. The best and the brightest join the gang, and one can easily pacify the rest with some soap opera or sport on TV.
Money, like any dopamine trigger, has diminishing psychological returns as one grows richer and richer. But even its tangible returns diminish in comparative value. In the struggle against disease and death, to have a dollar to buy an antibiotic is a far bigger leap from a position of absolute vulnerability, than for a rich man to afford another high-priced specialist in Japan.
Who doesn't struggle with the stress introduced by the pursuit of money versus the need to convince oneself that it is worth it? That convincing can, these days, take the form of media madness, "shopping" for useless junkets or fancy clothes, and outsourced pampering. To at least numb the mind somehow.
But I guess even the most distracted of money-makers would wonder at times whether it is "worth it" to do hard time in order to gain an easier time later. There is no one, or right, answer to this question.
If you are directly going bald and heart-sick in your indirect pursuit of joy and health via money, there is perhaps something wrong. It is facile to say: "live for the moment" rather than "save for the future". Both need attention. Too much of a focus on the future, and the present becomes a punishment. Too much of a focus on the present with nary a thought for the future, and may god bless you with good fortune.
The big question that seems to fox many is: "Can money buy happiness?" One is asked to observe the unhappy rich and the occasional happy poor, cleverly glossing over the luxuriating rich and the vast numbers of the unhappy poor. There are parables galore (ref the fisherman resting on the beach). It is a question which the poor are rhetorically asked, the middle classes torture themselves with, and the rich have to disregard.
The merely conceptual/tautological analysis would yield the unsatisfactory reply: Insofar as happiness can be arranged, it can be arranged better with the help of a generic enabler that money is.
Another equally unsatisfactory answer is: Having money can prevent hardship. And it can certainly lead to pleasures. Happiness, we don't know. That's your problem. Even the gurus haven't figured it out yet.
But to answer this question in earnest, one has to investigate what happiness is. In most cases, it will be found, happiness is harmony with one's surroundings, fulfilling associations with other human beings, and good mental and physical health. It is easy to see that (the pursuit of) money can be counter-productive in all three of the above aspects. Its pursuit can lead to pollution and devastation, suspicion and lack of trust, and neuroses and illnesses. And it would be ironical to then try to solve these problems which the pursuit of money introduced, with the rewards of that pursuit.
It is perhaps healthiest to consider the journey as well as the eventual pot of gold as important. To buy happiness at the mileposts as one journeys to get richer. And to continue to enjoy what doesn't cost anything. Urination and watching the stars, for example.
Money is a valid claim only insofar its acceptability is mandated by law. It is an institution.
Money extends a trade in time. You hand over something of real value, and in return, you are given money, a claim on humanity for the future.
To hand over money to someone and expect something of value in return is an implicit celebration of this institution.
Money is the true "sanchit karma": the accumulated value, in hard numbers, of your past deeds or pedigree.
Money enables, in future. And its enable-ability is guaranteed. And therein lies the key to its charm. It is a lasso to overwhelm time. To have a million in the bank is as good as walking with an army of bodyguards, slaves, doctors, lawyers, and so on.
To have money in one's pocket is to have a command over one's environment.
Someone who shuns money, or regards its pursuit as mistaken, usually does not produce something of value for the others. Such a person has an unjustified sense of entitlement over others. Beware of the man who seeks to pick your pocket by calling its contents worthless.
Since it is a bulwark against the vagaries of time, there is no limit to how much more money one wants. As long as immortality cannot be bought, no amount of money is ever going to be enough.
The difference between greed and ambition is simple: Greed involves seeking unjust rewards. To want to steal, rob, manipulate, hoodwink, is to be greedy. To work hard, plan carefully, to want to grow, to produce something of value to others, is ambition.
Money is a form of power over others which others cannot wriggle out of. Influence, reputation, beauty are also forms of power, in that they lead to (mostly) a willing subservience. But non-monetary forms of power are neither easy to possess, nor easy to maintain.
There is the valid criticism that the pursuit of money can become self-serving, an end in itself. I find that criticism naive. Money is obviously an end in itself till it is spent. Castigating someone for only collecting money and not spending it all within the month, is to berate him for thinking further ahead than most people. Maybe he is more afraid of mortality than others, maybe he wishes to do something great for society or enable a grand sense of security for his family.
To shun money (ref Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa) because greed is a base instinct, is to throw out the baby with the bath water. But this is a general trait, more pronounced in the East. To forget ambition, love and belonging, to see the negatives of lust, greed, attachment, and to thereby condemn women, money, relationships, and to then exhort celibacy, poverty and detachment. Humanity continues and flourishes not because of the renunciates, but because of those who struggle with, and try to balance, the rewards and sorrows of their instincts.
Of course the institution of money is corrupt, like any other institution. Of course inflation is a bit of a fraud, of course there is manipulation in commodities and in the stock markets, but the battle between greed and law will continue as long as we are human. What is the alternative? Money is here to stay. Only a progressive evolution of our institutions is our choice.
Since it is such an important institution, there is a class of industry which deals solely with the management of money and associated paper. The Financial Services Industry. It is a complex question whether they add real value to society. Certainly there are a lot of very rich people in this sector, with nary an accomplishment against their name except having made good bets due to privileged access to information, more efficient processing of money-related information, having found arbitrage opportunities, and having found interesting loopholes in the system.
Are the money-experts the baron-robbers of modern times who go away laughing from plundered cities? There is a general agreement that many of them need to be firmly reined in. But one of the strangest conundrums is: anyone who knows or understands enough about money to rein them in, joins hands with them. To thwart this very real nexus of regulators, state, financiers, requires a person of Jesus' moral strength who has memorized and understood the scriptures of Mammon and who has the warfare skills of Clausewitz. The best and the brightest join the gang, and one can easily pacify the rest with some soap opera or sport on TV.
Money, like any dopamine trigger, has diminishing psychological returns as one grows richer and richer. But even its tangible returns diminish in comparative value. In the struggle against disease and death, to have a dollar to buy an antibiotic is a far bigger leap from a position of absolute vulnerability, than for a rich man to afford another high-priced specialist in Japan.
Who doesn't struggle with the stress introduced by the pursuit of money versus the need to convince oneself that it is worth it? That convincing can, these days, take the form of media madness, "shopping" for useless junkets or fancy clothes, and outsourced pampering. To at least numb the mind somehow.
But I guess even the most distracted of money-makers would wonder at times whether it is "worth it" to do hard time in order to gain an easier time later. There is no one, or right, answer to this question.
If you are directly going bald and heart-sick in your indirect pursuit of joy and health via money, there is perhaps something wrong. It is facile to say: "live for the moment" rather than "save for the future". Both need attention. Too much of a focus on the future, and the present becomes a punishment. Too much of a focus on the present with nary a thought for the future, and may god bless you with good fortune.
The big question that seems to fox many is: "Can money buy happiness?" One is asked to observe the unhappy rich and the occasional happy poor, cleverly glossing over the luxuriating rich and the vast numbers of the unhappy poor. There are parables galore (ref the fisherman resting on the beach). It is a question which the poor are rhetorically asked, the middle classes torture themselves with, and the rich have to disregard.
The merely conceptual/tautological analysis would yield the unsatisfactory reply: Insofar as happiness can be arranged, it can be arranged better with the help of a generic enabler that money is.
Another equally unsatisfactory answer is: Having money can prevent hardship. And it can certainly lead to pleasures. Happiness, we don't know. That's your problem. Even the gurus haven't figured it out yet.
But to answer this question in earnest, one has to investigate what happiness is. In most cases, it will be found, happiness is harmony with one's surroundings, fulfilling associations with other human beings, and good mental and physical health. It is easy to see that (the pursuit of) money can be counter-productive in all three of the above aspects. Its pursuit can lead to pollution and devastation, suspicion and lack of trust, and neuroses and illnesses. And it would be ironical to then try to solve these problems which the pursuit of money introduced, with the rewards of that pursuit.
It is perhaps healthiest to consider the journey as well as the eventual pot of gold as important. To buy happiness at the mileposts as one journeys to get richer. And to continue to enjoy what doesn't cost anything. Urination and watching the stars, for example.
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