The Anthropic Dual: A Tale of Two (sub)-Species
A Comment On “La Condition Humaine”
PREAMBLE
For at least the last 35 years, I have felt that the solution to ALL the ills of humankind vest with women: there is no societal ill - from capitalism, to militarism, to despotism - that is not male-inspired, directed, and enshrined.
Both greed and domination have been male preserves for millenia (it is these twin -traits that undermine every 'emancipatory' movement, sooner or later).Women have largely 'looked the other way' leaving such madness(es) to men whilst they built the life convivial 'in the shadows' , in the domain(s) of domesticity.Now, it is time that they 'stepped out' , and said NO. I rather think they are, today, 'on the move'.I think they will succeed.
And all we men have to do is to 'step aside', so to speak (voluntarily, or involuntarily).
The only partial exception to the 'rule' I enunciate above is the many tribal societies that have successfully 'imprisoned' the predatory drives of men within the healing matrix of kinship(this does not eliminate the drives but places restraints on them). And we cannot hope to do much better than that(unless genetic engineering discovers a way). Note that this is not 'utopian' since such 'states of social being' have already been achieved.
In my 2007 Festschrift Lecture I call this 'gender struggle' the clash of the 'paradigm of masculinity' with the 'paradigm of femininity', each being viewed as a 'cluster of traits' . The Lecture(s) is available on YouTube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDwQrpfom9M
[This rumination, above, I had sent to a few friends/acquaintances recently: understandably, the males in that group declined direct comment, but a few women responded skeptically pointing to the postures of some of the ‘big name’ women out in politics currently as not presenting much hope. This somewhat extended Comment, below, might help situate some important matters: or so I would like to imagine].
***
Some truths can be so trivial, as to escape notice.
To participate (effectively) in the exclusively male domain of power the few women who do, are, - whether aware or not - 'self-selected' by male criteria: the vast majority of women of course don't make that choice, and remain outside of such processes.
When I suggested women will/could now assert themselves it will NOT be the likes of Hillary Clintons or the Queens of England: i.e. to 'rule' like men - but to fundamentally 'feminise' societal goals, in toto, by dismantling/defusing male institutions /approaches by simply approaching them qua women.
YES (providentially) WOMEN ARE NOT LIKE MEN.
To state this simple truth , I am aware, is to court a near knee-jerk critique from all variants of Modernist Ideology (left, right and centre: I have devoted a book length study to the delusions of that latter named, in my work entitled Against Eurocentrism ).
This Fact, far from being vitiated by the charge of 'essentialism' (the ideological bugaboo defined by Euro-Modernism) illustrates a very plain , and widely understood, existential truth: i.e. it is VERIFIABLE by the empirical record: let's score , for example, of necessity very quickly!, all the Females who have built Empires that committed genocide, raped men en masse, looted , plundered, and planned and dropped nuclear devices on hapless civilians.
Ok: so the list is about as long as a book on the wit and wisdom of George Bush (Jr.).
No wonder no self-aware woman seeks 'equality' with men (in a very different vein, it has been well said that women who actually seek such equality simply lack ambition...).
It is also indefeasible realism: it is in their INSTINCTS that men and women differ.
Yes , Virginia, we are natural creatures vested with natural propensities .
The so-called ‘Enlightenment’ that made governing European males think of themselves as near-gods, was to carry on , but now in amended secular vein, the hoary anthropic Judeo-Christian tradition of seeing humans as apart from, and ‘above’, animals.
Modernism, the broad intellectual seeding-ground for Capitalism (and its twin, Socialism) fears 'instincts': they are contrary to its 'rationalist' (if misanthropic) postulates.
So it is that animals are allowed 'instincts' , but we can’t have them - for: a) in the JC view we are not of their order, and b) also, we must , as modernists be 'rationalist’: if not, then we fail prescribed capitalist criteria as, say, in the premises of economics e.g. where to be 'rational’ is to be, inescapably, materialist i.e. we must 'want more' by theoretical fiat (so, as an aside, a Buddhist or a Jain could not pass a micro-econ exam: also, note how a philosophy of materialism is insouciantly tagged on to the metaphysic of rationalism).
To be 'rational' is to be materialist (yes, we are ALL pigs – figure of speech only, no offense to that inoffensive animal- in modernist economic theory, as we join hands to reach for that 'higher' indifference curve), ex hypothesi (one can now imagine the shock waves that the great Darwin set off by his works, to such creative pseudo-anthropology-: yet, modernist social science was to survive it all, unfazed, in its ignoble stride).
Now Instincts mess up such pathetically tendentious parables.
But Nature is what nature is: so we can't invent ourselves as a new species, sui generis.
Of course, Modernist ‘social science’ – where the adjective is far more telling than the noun - is an eclectic jumble of ill-fitting ideas and epistemologies : e.g. in social anthropology, the study of non-Europeans by Europeans, we seek and find ‘difference’, usually to elevate European societies on some or other scale; yet, in Economics ,we assume a ‘homogenous’ rational economic man.
Or, take Micro and Macro in Economics: Micro ‘assumes’ individual actors/behaviors which ‘add-up’ to the economy, obviating any social (inter)dependencies: Macro , suddenly , morphs these intrepid individuals into near-Class categories (lumps) of collective behaviors. No wonder, the average freshman student finds it all beyond him/her, and, resorts, resignedly, to committing it all to rote.
So instincts still crop up, if randomly: they are ‘ok’ in variants of psychoanalytical theory e.g. via Freud (where we are gratuitously gifted largely phony 'instincts ' such as 'Oedipal' cravings - and , similarly, Keynes, for his part, can speak, quite seriously, of 'animal spirits’: boy, did he get that phrase right! ).
And Levi-Strauss, we might recall , in heroic modernist vein, attacked Freud - saying, more or less that 'instincts explain nothing: they are that need to be explained'.
Really, instincts explain nothing?
Let’s parse this notion a bit: this heroic European male would have to be quite a god, in his own right, is he not?
Yes, of course: for HE is the enlightenment-powered-rationalist-bearer-of-emancipatory-tidings-and civilizing-missions-for-all-humankind, such as liberte, egalite, (except , alas, for women and non-Europeans who had to fight HIM for exactly those rights) , and (my humble addition) - banalite.
He is sans anything so contemptible, and lowly, as mere 'nature' .
Robert Solow, Nobel Economics laureate, is supposed to have said, more or less, in a talk that 'we can do without nature’ (if true, what a barking example of the unabashedly conquistadorean approach to our universal , generative matrix!): and , naturally, his fellow travelers are now seeing to that as a realisable empirical goal in the very near future - except, au contraire, the real truth might well be that ‘nature can do without us’.
Father ‘Science’ , one notes, is not very respectful of 'mother' Nature, in the Modernist idiom.
One has only to watch the public antics of our current scientist-heroes - Dawkins, Krauss, et. al., -to see how they strut, congratulating themselves on what they take to be their thundering anthropic achievements: after all, they are no part of this nature that they are subjecting to inquisition, and better still, they have done it all with no assistance from nature, such as , just possibly, that gracious, evolutionary ‘gift’ of grey matter.
Yet 'nature', banished from the salons and boudoirs, is invited back in when it is serviceable, e.g., in justifying oppressions.
Possibly why, despite all of the above protestations , both women and so-called 'primitives' were seen at one time, by the same lineage of Law-Givers as, no less, ' naturvolk' , belonging to the domain of the,yes, ‘instinctual’: oops.
Or, take the term ‘human nature’ ( a bit oxymoronic:or is it just plain moronic?) which was such a heuristic template in the construction of the ‘Social Contract’ schools of speculation. How easefully were ‘men and women’ conflated within One, single, Monist ‘human nature’, in particular when amplifying its pejorative traits, wherein Women , implicitly, were absorbed into the gross catalog of the egregious sins of Men.
The German Enlightenment (Nietzsche, Schopenheur, et. al, not least influenced by Ancient Indian Vedic texts)went far in this regard, where the presumed ‘nobility’of men , in contrast to the craven natures of women was seen as virtually axiomatic.
Even where extremism was absent, the privileging of men as ‘rational’ (though dispassionate calculation is what they were getting at) and the disparagement of women as ‘emotional’ was/is a common binary.
It never occurred to these worthies that they might actually be viewing it all in a contorted mirror image - i.e, the wrong way around: that they might be capturing , but ‘falsely’ , a real division between men and women that is rarely allowed to intrude into social theory.
Of course, this ideology was not at all inconsistent with hoary Biblical wisdom where sin falls upon the human race by virtue of error on the part of the eternally vulnerable female(‘frailty ,thy name is woman’ echoed Shakespeare).
In fact, the telling phrase ‘women and children’ is eloquence itself, in its patriarchical coupling: and so , amongst a host of even more vital disabilities , women in supposedly ‘advanced’ European republics like Denmark and Switzerland had to wait longer than some European colonies, for the right merely to have the franchise extended to them (the ‘shrew’ had to be tamed first, presumably) . After all , why would such ‘enlightened’ preux chevaliers give the vote to children?
But , to return to context.
I have cited my Lectures , in the Preamble to this Comment, where a fuller explanation can be found, so let me, in desperate brevity , now define this male/female dyad.
Men are vested with the ‘instinct’ to kill (it’s an entire set of traits constituting what I term the ‘paradigm of masculinity ‘) and women with the ‘instinct’ to nurture (which I term the’ paradigm of femininity’).
Now note that I speak, necessarily, of instincts: this is not to say that either sex cannot ‘mindfully’ depart from text - but it does constitute a departure, ‘going against the grain’ so to speak.
Essentialism?
Really?
Let us now address that issue.
Firstly, if an empirical fact is confirmed ad nauseam, across millennia it is (or becomes) an existential fact, for there can be no gainsaying the grim record in the history of humankind of wholly masculine predations ( I have already noted but a few choice headers in that grim litany: mass rapes, slaughters/ extirpations, genocides, and so on.)
Secondly , leaving such humbly demotic empirics aside, what ‘prior knowledge’ of Creation/Evolution does Modernism possess, to, a priori, ex cathedra , deny the existence of what are termed ‘essences’?
There is not, nor can be, any such epistemic ‘foreknowledge’ of absence :only Argument ex Hypothesi.
And , assertion is not proof.
Besides, are there no instincts vested in men and women that are at all recognizable across history and cultures (despite some of the more facile fabrications of Margaret Mead), via their empirical expression(s)/(wo)manifestations?
I believe the evidence is overwhelming.
Let me argue now, by analogy: does Nature not posses ‘essential’ properties?
Consider: Isn’t gravity an ‘essential’ property of matter?
If so, why is it a surprise to discover similar ‘essences’ (or instincts) in humans: especially when we grant their existence in animals with whom we share so much of our genetic make-up?
Because we are ‘enlightened’, and therefore have ‘left nature behind’?
Or because we are , artfully, ‘made’ in the image of Jesus?
So, it’s time we put to rest the old shibboleths.
There is not one but TWO ‘human natures’: men and women are two distinct sub-species of the human race.
And, unmistakably, men have ruled over women, in collective terms: there is no historical instance of any female ‘ruling class’ returning that ‘favor’.
(ii)
Now , to extend the Argument.
There are some powerful analogs here to be noted: men have oppressed women, much as Europeans have oppressed Non-Europeans, and property-owning and/or power-wielding classes have oppressed the sans-culotte.
What happens when the oppressed orders, as they oft times do, begin to challenge their oppressors?
The rulers respond either by outright suppression or, more cleverly, by favoring a few of the sans-cullotte to move up to ranks of ‘leadership’ so long as they can ‘play by the rules’.
This has been the case, e.g., with the long history of anti-Colonial revolts.
Indeed, in the case of British India , Lord Macaulay decreed a Minute on Education (which, fatefully, shapes the educational system in India to this day), which carefully laid out the need to create a cadre of Indians that were ‘native in color, but English in tastes’.
But, given propitious circumstances , such a loyal ‘Fifth Column’ is eventually routed by others far more authentically representative of the suppressed orders.
This is what is at work today: there are more women in ‘leadership’ roles in politics than ever before in modernist history (the US Senate has 20 women, the largest admittance of its kind: and, the world over, more women Chief Executives than ever before )
Yet these women are by no means, necessarily, representing women, in the first, or even the last , instance: they are simply ‘playing by the rules’ (and winning).
But the story does not end there.
In much the same way as workers need to (and often do) acquire a full ‘consciousness’ of their condition, and natives similarly of their own servitude, women have to: a) come to recognise their own conditions of existence, and b) recognize also the need to do something about it.
This is a process - that takes time and evolution(learning by doing, and undoing).
And the process faces formidable odds: the powerful Ideology of Patriarchy has been around for millennia, so a Simone de Beauvoir here, or a Gloria Steinem there are insufficient , though important, in themselves, to occasion such transformations.
As US elections demonstrate a skillfully managed media will not let women ‘play the women card’ any more than they let Obama ‘play the race card’ (even had he wished to, which he quite obviously didn’t, because he didn’t have to:in fact the only card on the table , in such races, is the Capitalist-Empire card, a well-worn card, which is played by all, more or less).
As such the Candidates that are allowed to gain any notice are those that: a) are hand-picked by the governors, and/or b) have already cloned themselves in light of prevailing norms.
So , it might be expected that a whole slew of women in leadership are, likely, but token -women, male alter-egos , molded by Patriarchy.
This is not at all to trivialize their roles or achievements , but merely to point to the limits within which they can , and might be expected to, function.
Despite the caveats, they are yet a visible symbol to millions (of men and women) that women can do what men do: and like the wily Indira Gandhi, of India, sometimes beat men at their own game(s).
And that last holds out the possibility that, given the right circumstances even ‘token’ women may be prompted to break ranks.
And that is far from being trivial.
(iii)
But all this, thus far, is commonplace.
What is of much larger moment is the conjecture, that women, being ‘different’, pursue their ‘politics’ , also. differently.
Our very understanding of political power, let alone the means used to acquire it, and the use to which it is put, might well alter fundamentally, if this be true.
A few thought experiments might help elucidate that.
Can one imagine a political party that is solely of women, by women, and for women?
What might it aim to achieve, i.e., what might be its Agenda?
How would it go about trying to implement that Agenda?
How would it relate to other ‘mainstream’ (or ‘manstream’ ) institutions?
Or consider further: how would standard policing functions and practices alter , in society, if All police were constituted by women?
Ditto, for Armies?
And Parliaments?
Even more interestingly: would they retain Police, Armies, and Parliaments, at all?
What Political/ Societal priorities would women espouse if they were ‘in charge’?.
And how might women, left to themselves, solve perennial conflicts such as Israel-Palestine, or India-Pakistan? (Here’s a clue: what if droves of Israeli and Palestinian women , one fine day, frenzied by the relentless violence, just walked across their respective borders to join hands and cry out : Enough!).
What would their notions of ‘Justice’ be?
Or War? Or Empire?
Or Science? Or the State?
If such queries seem ‘odd’ , perhaps one might reflect: is there nothing , similarly, ‘odd’ about gender-singularity when that gender happens to be men, as it has in all history?
In effect , could it not be true that ALL our ideas about ‘human society’ - philosophical, scientific, and cultural - have been shaped, or rather, ‘warped’ by the outright , monist, and exclusivist Male Domination of it.
Women have been, undeniably, the omitted, nay shunned, OTHER in the grand societal game played by men.
And so we are ALL, men and women, reared virtually indelibly in a Man’s World, believing HIS dreams, delusions, and dysfunctions, to be eternally ‘human’ and ‘universal’, and, even worse, ‘inevitable’!
So it is that it is Men who have defined our standards of ‘normalcy’ and all manner of Appropriate/Inappropriate conduct(s), including, most importantly, Morality and Religion.
How would world religions be different if Women were their inspirations, and not men?
Indeed, would ‘religion’, as we know it, even exist?
Would a woman Buddha never have forsaken family and loved ones to seek an arid, abstract ‘enlightenment’ abroad?
Would a Jane Christ let herself - even as scriptural fantasy - suffer crucifixion ,in that ultimate trope of the male ego, or might she have , intelligently, ‘compromised’ with the ‘enemy’ and called for a truce?
Would ‘enemies’ exist ,even epistemologically, in their discourse?
Would their philosophers have moaned on in paroxysms of existential despair, or drown themselves in a swamp of misanthropic nihilism?
Would Capitalism exist, as we know it today, if women had to make that choice?
Would they have built the Bomb, and used it?
Further, would they have beshrouded the living planet with unscalable means of instant nuclear annihilation?
Would they have, for good measure, let the ‘profit motive’ destroy the environment, let entire species disappear, patented life-forms, and experimented with biological weapons of warfare?
Would they have fought Two Global Wars, not to mention a quadrillion smaller ones, and prepared for a Third one, to ‘protect’ ethnic, national, or economic , supremacy?
Would they have, cheerfully, practiced genocide, or enslaved entire peoples?
In sum, could it be that a woman’s world, if SHE were permitted to wish it into existence, would be somewhat different than ours?
If so, can the question, therefore, not be asked: do we, thereby, really live in a ‘human’ society, or merely in Its ‘worst case scenario’ of Patriarchy?
And so we can ,thereby, also ask: can the world not be better than it is if we could somehow break with its current Masculinist monism?
(iv)
I have argued elsewhere (notably in my Against Eurocentrism) that all of Europeam Utopian cravings from the Sixteenth Century on , More to Marx, were an extended, passionate crie de couer , lamenting a ‘paradise lost’: of the social affections.
Stated simply, the expansionary drives of Modernist-Capitalist-Patriarchy had put the Big Chill upon the ‘life-convivial’ as monetization , commerce, and industry leveled ‘organic society’ and its many, if simple, hospitalities.
Real anthropic societies , good or bad, are not ‘contractual’ but Affectual - which is why modernist ‘society’ is society rent with conflict/dissension , dysfunction, and anomie, and therefore is not a society at all.
And at the heart of affective society is the familial principle, upon which template women have, across time and space, built the foundations of conviviality and civilization.
Notice that the ‘family’ is a natural entity (it exists amongst many animals, too) despite its many societal/cultural forms.
Notice it is neither democratic, egalitarian (in contrast with the wretched dissimulations of Modernist propaganda), nor contractual: but it still gives the human animal, male or female, what it (apparently) craves most: warmth , love, and affection.
We , as mammals, are heat-seeking (not light-seeking: navel contemplation has been a singularly male hobby) animals: at our fondest , we huddle.
It may be the only ‘paradise’ that is possible within the rather desperate anthropic condition.
And it is women who , for millennia, have helped constitute it.
And it is men, who , out of touch with their own feelings and (mis)led by their unbridled egos, ‘step outside’ that magic circle, and begin that free-falling descent into alienation from their own species-being that has, over centuries of devolution, produced the turbid turbulence of Modernism.
So, male-articulated utopias (“Socialism”, “Garden of Eden”) were simply heartfelt, wished-for extensions of that modus of ‘hearth and home’ whose warmth/felicity was being corroded/corrupted by the fell forces of greed and commerce.
One has only to read Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” to glean their pathos, or some of Marx’s earlier writings (before he succumbed to the very masculinist temptation of ‘scientific socialism’).
So it is in the domain of kinship that the ‘feminine principle’ has been most active in history ( tribal societies are all species of extended families), and women have an ‘instinctive’ affinity for it.
Why?
Because they are , then and now (barring some new genetic/social engineering that may alter this) , the bearers , and first nurturers, of new life .
Further, this new life, in the human animal, is more vulnerable than many in the animal world , and requires years of intensive caring ( that can only be assured if a modicum of relative peace prevails; and that is also the locus, in society of all societal morality).
So, women are/have been the virtual founders of the convivial order of family and domesticity: and these ‘values’ are not ‘free choices’ , but imposed by the ‘natural-social’ requirements of child rearing.
In effect, women are, and have to be, the original peace-makers.
Now there, in radically encapsulated form, one has both the essentialist and the existentialist basis for the ‘difference’ I have argued is fundamental to understanding the male/female dyad.
( v)
It is ironic that our wildest dreams never wander too far from reality, for we , apparently, know so very little other than ourselves (and sometimes not even that).
Indeed , the paucity of the human imagination is far more striking than its alleged sweep(consider the laughable limits of science-fiction when visualising ‘other’ forms of life, for instance).
So, to imagine a woman’s world may be startling at first, specially to the bigoted.
But, it is - if nothing else - necessary.
Indeed , therein may lie our only hope for a real , permanent salve ,give the depletingly repetitive pattern of masculinist conflicts/tensions in world history.
And women’s powers lie girdling us all like a vast ocean of uncharted possibilities, so we would be foolhardy to think that they are only effective when curbing , say, drunk driving a la MADD.
However, this latter example may, possibly, hold a clue.
What would it take to get the vast body of women to care deeply enough about the ills of the world ( which, sooner or later, are visited upon them) to wish to become pro-actively involved in changing the world?
Could it be , perhaps, only when their very last refuge from the wasteland of male madness is threatened with extinction?
In India, for example, the unbelievable rash of brutal, public, daylight attacks upon women has fomented a rising tide of ire of a kind that has not existed since antic Gandhian times of anti-British agitation.
But such a logos may , I think, yet be mistaken - perhaps it is MEN who now have to realize the enormous potential of women in all the regards discussed above, and thereby:
a)begin to learn from women, and alter/restrain their own ways, or b) ‘step aside’, and let women ‘manage’ the public household, or c) adopt both a) and b).
By the way, a) is no leap of fancy - it has already been achieved, typically without homage to its inspiration: Gandhi’s Satyagraha and Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience are but variants of the art of passive resistance that women have deployed, universally, with some effectiveness , if mostly within the domestic household.
It may also not be merely in the kind/quality of means deployed that women have much to teach us all: it may be , far more importantly, in the wider, ‘higher’ charter of human-societal Ends and Goals.
Of course, I am ‘only’ speculating: but is there any truth that has been gained/gleaned in science or philosophy that did not first commence with a speculative query?
Indeed, en generale, might it not be a revelation for us all to learn that Women may afford the ‘natural’ solution (s) to all Male (inspired) problems?
There is a certain poetic justice to it.
And if so: would that register another evolutionary triumph for Nature, or be just more evidence for inspired ‘Design’?
The question abides.
[©2013, R.Kanth,Harvard University]
A Comment On “La Condition Humaine”
PREAMBLE
For at least the last 35 years, I have felt that the solution to ALL the ills of humankind vest with women: there is no societal ill - from capitalism, to militarism, to despotism - that is not male-inspired, directed, and enshrined.
Both greed and domination have been male preserves for millenia (it is these twin -traits that undermine every 'emancipatory' movement, sooner or later).Women have largely 'looked the other way' leaving such madness(es) to men whilst they built the life convivial 'in the shadows' , in the domain(s) of domesticity.Now, it is time that they 'stepped out' , and said NO. I rather think they are, today, 'on the move'.I think they will succeed.
And all we men have to do is to 'step aside', so to speak (voluntarily, or involuntarily).
The only partial exception to the 'rule' I enunciate above is the many tribal societies that have successfully 'imprisoned' the predatory drives of men within the healing matrix of kinship(this does not eliminate the drives but places restraints on them). And we cannot hope to do much better than that(unless genetic engineering discovers a way). Note that this is not 'utopian' since such 'states of social being' have already been achieved.
In my 2007 Festschrift Lecture I call this 'gender struggle' the clash of the 'paradigm of masculinity' with the 'paradigm of femininity', each being viewed as a 'cluster of traits' . The Lecture(s) is available on YouTube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDwQrpfom9M
[This rumination, above, I had sent to a few friends/acquaintances recently: understandably, the males in that group declined direct comment, but a few women responded skeptically pointing to the postures of some of the ‘big name’ women out in politics currently as not presenting much hope. This somewhat extended Comment, below, might help situate some important matters: or so I would like to imagine].
***
Some truths can be so trivial, as to escape notice.
To participate (effectively) in the exclusively male domain of power the few women who do, are, - whether aware or not - 'self-selected' by male criteria: the vast majority of women of course don't make that choice, and remain outside of such processes.
When I suggested women will/could now assert themselves it will NOT be the likes of Hillary Clintons or the Queens of England: i.e. to 'rule' like men - but to fundamentally 'feminise' societal goals, in toto, by dismantling/defusing male institutions /approaches by simply approaching them qua women.
YES (providentially) WOMEN ARE NOT LIKE MEN.
To state this simple truth , I am aware, is to court a near knee-jerk critique from all variants of Modernist Ideology (left, right and centre: I have devoted a book length study to the delusions of that latter named, in my work entitled Against Eurocentrism ).
This Fact, far from being vitiated by the charge of 'essentialism' (the ideological bugaboo defined by Euro-Modernism) illustrates a very plain , and widely understood, existential truth: i.e. it is VERIFIABLE by the empirical record: let's score , for example, of necessity very quickly!, all the Females who have built Empires that committed genocide, raped men en masse, looted , plundered, and planned and dropped nuclear devices on hapless civilians.
Ok: so the list is about as long as a book on the wit and wisdom of George Bush (Jr.).
No wonder no self-aware woman seeks 'equality' with men (in a very different vein, it has been well said that women who actually seek such equality simply lack ambition...).
It is also indefeasible realism: it is in their INSTINCTS that men and women differ.
Yes , Virginia, we are natural creatures vested with natural propensities .
The so-called ‘Enlightenment’ that made governing European males think of themselves as near-gods, was to carry on , but now in amended secular vein, the hoary anthropic Judeo-Christian tradition of seeing humans as apart from, and ‘above’, animals.
Modernism, the broad intellectual seeding-ground for Capitalism (and its twin, Socialism) fears 'instincts': they are contrary to its 'rationalist' (if misanthropic) postulates.
So it is that animals are allowed 'instincts' , but we can’t have them - for: a) in the JC view we are not of their order, and b) also, we must , as modernists be 'rationalist’: if not, then we fail prescribed capitalist criteria as, say, in the premises of economics e.g. where to be 'rational’ is to be, inescapably, materialist i.e. we must 'want more' by theoretical fiat (so, as an aside, a Buddhist or a Jain could not pass a micro-econ exam: also, note how a philosophy of materialism is insouciantly tagged on to the metaphysic of rationalism).
To be 'rational' is to be materialist (yes, we are ALL pigs – figure of speech only, no offense to that inoffensive animal- in modernist economic theory, as we join hands to reach for that 'higher' indifference curve), ex hypothesi (one can now imagine the shock waves that the great Darwin set off by his works, to such creative pseudo-anthropology-: yet, modernist social science was to survive it all, unfazed, in its ignoble stride).
Now Instincts mess up such pathetically tendentious parables.
But Nature is what nature is: so we can't invent ourselves as a new species, sui generis.
Of course, Modernist ‘social science’ – where the adjective is far more telling than the noun - is an eclectic jumble of ill-fitting ideas and epistemologies : e.g. in social anthropology, the study of non-Europeans by Europeans, we seek and find ‘difference’, usually to elevate European societies on some or other scale; yet, in Economics ,we assume a ‘homogenous’ rational economic man.
Or, take Micro and Macro in Economics: Micro ‘assumes’ individual actors/behaviors which ‘add-up’ to the economy, obviating any social (inter)dependencies: Macro , suddenly , morphs these intrepid individuals into near-Class categories (lumps) of collective behaviors. No wonder, the average freshman student finds it all beyond him/her, and, resorts, resignedly, to committing it all to rote.
So instincts still crop up, if randomly: they are ‘ok’ in variants of psychoanalytical theory e.g. via Freud (where we are gratuitously gifted largely phony 'instincts ' such as 'Oedipal' cravings - and , similarly, Keynes, for his part, can speak, quite seriously, of 'animal spirits’: boy, did he get that phrase right! ).
And Levi-Strauss, we might recall , in heroic modernist vein, attacked Freud - saying, more or less that 'instincts explain nothing: they are that need to be explained'.
Really, instincts explain nothing?
Let’s parse this notion a bit: this heroic European male would have to be quite a god, in his own right, is he not?
Yes, of course: for HE is the enlightenment-powered-rationalist-bearer-of-emancipatory-tidings-and civilizing-missions-for-all-humankind, such as liberte, egalite, (except , alas, for women and non-Europeans who had to fight HIM for exactly those rights) , and (my humble addition) - banalite.
He is sans anything so contemptible, and lowly, as mere 'nature' .
Robert Solow, Nobel Economics laureate, is supposed to have said, more or less, in a talk that 'we can do without nature’ (if true, what a barking example of the unabashedly conquistadorean approach to our universal , generative matrix!): and , naturally, his fellow travelers are now seeing to that as a realisable empirical goal in the very near future - except, au contraire, the real truth might well be that ‘nature can do without us’.
Father ‘Science’ , one notes, is not very respectful of 'mother' Nature, in the Modernist idiom.
One has only to watch the public antics of our current scientist-heroes - Dawkins, Krauss, et. al., -to see how they strut, congratulating themselves on what they take to be their thundering anthropic achievements: after all, they are no part of this nature that they are subjecting to inquisition, and better still, they have done it all with no assistance from nature, such as , just possibly, that gracious, evolutionary ‘gift’ of grey matter.
Yet 'nature', banished from the salons and boudoirs, is invited back in when it is serviceable, e.g., in justifying oppressions.
Possibly why, despite all of the above protestations , both women and so-called 'primitives' were seen at one time, by the same lineage of Law-Givers as, no less, ' naturvolk' , belonging to the domain of the,yes, ‘instinctual’: oops.
Or, take the term ‘human nature’ ( a bit oxymoronic:or is it just plain moronic?) which was such a heuristic template in the construction of the ‘Social Contract’ schools of speculation. How easefully were ‘men and women’ conflated within One, single, Monist ‘human nature’, in particular when amplifying its pejorative traits, wherein Women , implicitly, were absorbed into the gross catalog of the egregious sins of Men.
The German Enlightenment (Nietzsche, Schopenheur, et. al, not least influenced by Ancient Indian Vedic texts)went far in this regard, where the presumed ‘nobility’of men , in contrast to the craven natures of women was seen as virtually axiomatic.
Even where extremism was absent, the privileging of men as ‘rational’ (though dispassionate calculation is what they were getting at) and the disparagement of women as ‘emotional’ was/is a common binary.
It never occurred to these worthies that they might actually be viewing it all in a contorted mirror image - i.e, the wrong way around: that they might be capturing , but ‘falsely’ , a real division between men and women that is rarely allowed to intrude into social theory.
Of course, this ideology was not at all inconsistent with hoary Biblical wisdom where sin falls upon the human race by virtue of error on the part of the eternally vulnerable female(‘frailty ,thy name is woman’ echoed Shakespeare).
In fact, the telling phrase ‘women and children’ is eloquence itself, in its patriarchical coupling: and so , amongst a host of even more vital disabilities , women in supposedly ‘advanced’ European republics like Denmark and Switzerland had to wait longer than some European colonies, for the right merely to have the franchise extended to them (the ‘shrew’ had to be tamed first, presumably) . After all , why would such ‘enlightened’ preux chevaliers give the vote to children?
But , to return to context.
I have cited my Lectures , in the Preamble to this Comment, where a fuller explanation can be found, so let me, in desperate brevity , now define this male/female dyad.
Men are vested with the ‘instinct’ to kill (it’s an entire set of traits constituting what I term the ‘paradigm of masculinity ‘) and women with the ‘instinct’ to nurture (which I term the’ paradigm of femininity’).
Now note that I speak, necessarily, of instincts: this is not to say that either sex cannot ‘mindfully’ depart from text - but it does constitute a departure, ‘going against the grain’ so to speak.
Essentialism?
Really?
Let us now address that issue.
Firstly, if an empirical fact is confirmed ad nauseam, across millennia it is (or becomes) an existential fact, for there can be no gainsaying the grim record in the history of humankind of wholly masculine predations ( I have already noted but a few choice headers in that grim litany: mass rapes, slaughters/ extirpations, genocides, and so on.)
Secondly , leaving such humbly demotic empirics aside, what ‘prior knowledge’ of Creation/Evolution does Modernism possess, to, a priori, ex cathedra , deny the existence of what are termed ‘essences’?
There is not, nor can be, any such epistemic ‘foreknowledge’ of absence :only Argument ex Hypothesi.
And , assertion is not proof.
Besides, are there no instincts vested in men and women that are at all recognizable across history and cultures (despite some of the more facile fabrications of Margaret Mead), via their empirical expression(s)/(wo)manifestations?
I believe the evidence is overwhelming.
Let me argue now, by analogy: does Nature not posses ‘essential’ properties?
Consider: Isn’t gravity an ‘essential’ property of matter?
If so, why is it a surprise to discover similar ‘essences’ (or instincts) in humans: especially when we grant their existence in animals with whom we share so much of our genetic make-up?
Because we are ‘enlightened’, and therefore have ‘left nature behind’?
Or because we are , artfully, ‘made’ in the image of Jesus?
So, it’s time we put to rest the old shibboleths.
There is not one but TWO ‘human natures’: men and women are two distinct sub-species of the human race.
And, unmistakably, men have ruled over women, in collective terms: there is no historical instance of any female ‘ruling class’ returning that ‘favor’.
(ii)
Now , to extend the Argument.
There are some powerful analogs here to be noted: men have oppressed women, much as Europeans have oppressed Non-Europeans, and property-owning and/or power-wielding classes have oppressed the sans-culotte.
What happens when the oppressed orders, as they oft times do, begin to challenge their oppressors?
The rulers respond either by outright suppression or, more cleverly, by favoring a few of the sans-cullotte to move up to ranks of ‘leadership’ so long as they can ‘play by the rules’.
This has been the case, e.g., with the long history of anti-Colonial revolts.
Indeed, in the case of British India , Lord Macaulay decreed a Minute on Education (which, fatefully, shapes the educational system in India to this day), which carefully laid out the need to create a cadre of Indians that were ‘native in color, but English in tastes’.
But, given propitious circumstances , such a loyal ‘Fifth Column’ is eventually routed by others far more authentically representative of the suppressed orders.
This is what is at work today: there are more women in ‘leadership’ roles in politics than ever before in modernist history (the US Senate has 20 women, the largest admittance of its kind: and, the world over, more women Chief Executives than ever before )
Yet these women are by no means, necessarily, representing women, in the first, or even the last , instance: they are simply ‘playing by the rules’ (and winning).
But the story does not end there.
In much the same way as workers need to (and often do) acquire a full ‘consciousness’ of their condition, and natives similarly of their own servitude, women have to: a) come to recognise their own conditions of existence, and b) recognize also the need to do something about it.
This is a process - that takes time and evolution(learning by doing, and undoing).
And the process faces formidable odds: the powerful Ideology of Patriarchy has been around for millennia, so a Simone de Beauvoir here, or a Gloria Steinem there are insufficient , though important, in themselves, to occasion such transformations.
As US elections demonstrate a skillfully managed media will not let women ‘play the women card’ any more than they let Obama ‘play the race card’ (even had he wished to, which he quite obviously didn’t, because he didn’t have to:in fact the only card on the table , in such races, is the Capitalist-Empire card, a well-worn card, which is played by all, more or less).
As such the Candidates that are allowed to gain any notice are those that: a) are hand-picked by the governors, and/or b) have already cloned themselves in light of prevailing norms.
So , it might be expected that a whole slew of women in leadership are, likely, but token -women, male alter-egos , molded by Patriarchy.
This is not at all to trivialize their roles or achievements , but merely to point to the limits within which they can , and might be expected to, function.
Despite the caveats, they are yet a visible symbol to millions (of men and women) that women can do what men do: and like the wily Indira Gandhi, of India, sometimes beat men at their own game(s).
And that last holds out the possibility that, given the right circumstances even ‘token’ women may be prompted to break ranks.
And that is far from being trivial.
(iii)
But all this, thus far, is commonplace.
What is of much larger moment is the conjecture, that women, being ‘different’, pursue their ‘politics’ , also. differently.
Our very understanding of political power, let alone the means used to acquire it, and the use to which it is put, might well alter fundamentally, if this be true.
A few thought experiments might help elucidate that.
Can one imagine a political party that is solely of women, by women, and for women?
What might it aim to achieve, i.e., what might be its Agenda?
How would it go about trying to implement that Agenda?
How would it relate to other ‘mainstream’ (or ‘manstream’ ) institutions?
Or consider further: how would standard policing functions and practices alter , in society, if All police were constituted by women?
Ditto, for Armies?
And Parliaments?
Even more interestingly: would they retain Police, Armies, and Parliaments, at all?
What Political/ Societal priorities would women espouse if they were ‘in charge’?.
And how might women, left to themselves, solve perennial conflicts such as Israel-Palestine, or India-Pakistan? (Here’s a clue: what if droves of Israeli and Palestinian women , one fine day, frenzied by the relentless violence, just walked across their respective borders to join hands and cry out : Enough!).
What would their notions of ‘Justice’ be?
Or War? Or Empire?
Or Science? Or the State?
If such queries seem ‘odd’ , perhaps one might reflect: is there nothing , similarly, ‘odd’ about gender-singularity when that gender happens to be men, as it has in all history?
In effect , could it not be true that ALL our ideas about ‘human society’ - philosophical, scientific, and cultural - have been shaped, or rather, ‘warped’ by the outright , monist, and exclusivist Male Domination of it.
Women have been, undeniably, the omitted, nay shunned, OTHER in the grand societal game played by men.
And so we are ALL, men and women, reared virtually indelibly in a Man’s World, believing HIS dreams, delusions, and dysfunctions, to be eternally ‘human’ and ‘universal’, and, even worse, ‘inevitable’!
So it is that it is Men who have defined our standards of ‘normalcy’ and all manner of Appropriate/Inappropriate conduct(s), including, most importantly, Morality and Religion.
How would world religions be different if Women were their inspirations, and not men?
Indeed, would ‘religion’, as we know it, even exist?
Would a woman Buddha never have forsaken family and loved ones to seek an arid, abstract ‘enlightenment’ abroad?
Would a Jane Christ let herself - even as scriptural fantasy - suffer crucifixion ,in that ultimate trope of the male ego, or might she have , intelligently, ‘compromised’ with the ‘enemy’ and called for a truce?
Would ‘enemies’ exist ,even epistemologically, in their discourse?
Would their philosophers have moaned on in paroxysms of existential despair, or drown themselves in a swamp of misanthropic nihilism?
Would Capitalism exist, as we know it today, if women had to make that choice?
Would they have built the Bomb, and used it?
Further, would they have beshrouded the living planet with unscalable means of instant nuclear annihilation?
Would they have, for good measure, let the ‘profit motive’ destroy the environment, let entire species disappear, patented life-forms, and experimented with biological weapons of warfare?
Would they have fought Two Global Wars, not to mention a quadrillion smaller ones, and prepared for a Third one, to ‘protect’ ethnic, national, or economic , supremacy?
Would they have, cheerfully, practiced genocide, or enslaved entire peoples?
In sum, could it be that a woman’s world, if SHE were permitted to wish it into existence, would be somewhat different than ours?
If so, can the question, therefore, not be asked: do we, thereby, really live in a ‘human’ society, or merely in Its ‘worst case scenario’ of Patriarchy?
And so we can ,thereby, also ask: can the world not be better than it is if we could somehow break with its current Masculinist monism?
(iv)
I have argued elsewhere (notably in my Against Eurocentrism) that all of Europeam Utopian cravings from the Sixteenth Century on , More to Marx, were an extended, passionate crie de couer , lamenting a ‘paradise lost’: of the social affections.
Stated simply, the expansionary drives of Modernist-Capitalist-Patriarchy had put the Big Chill upon the ‘life-convivial’ as monetization , commerce, and industry leveled ‘organic society’ and its many, if simple, hospitalities.
Real anthropic societies , good or bad, are not ‘contractual’ but Affectual - which is why modernist ‘society’ is society rent with conflict/dissension , dysfunction, and anomie, and therefore is not a society at all.
And at the heart of affective society is the familial principle, upon which template women have, across time and space, built the foundations of conviviality and civilization.
Notice that the ‘family’ is a natural entity (it exists amongst many animals, too) despite its many societal/cultural forms.
Notice it is neither democratic, egalitarian (in contrast with the wretched dissimulations of Modernist propaganda), nor contractual: but it still gives the human animal, male or female, what it (apparently) craves most: warmth , love, and affection.
We , as mammals, are heat-seeking (not light-seeking: navel contemplation has been a singularly male hobby) animals: at our fondest , we huddle.
It may be the only ‘paradise’ that is possible within the rather desperate anthropic condition.
And it is women who , for millennia, have helped constitute it.
And it is men, who , out of touch with their own feelings and (mis)led by their unbridled egos, ‘step outside’ that magic circle, and begin that free-falling descent into alienation from their own species-being that has, over centuries of devolution, produced the turbid turbulence of Modernism.
So, male-articulated utopias (“Socialism”, “Garden of Eden”) were simply heartfelt, wished-for extensions of that modus of ‘hearth and home’ whose warmth/felicity was being corroded/corrupted by the fell forces of greed and commerce.
One has only to read Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” to glean their pathos, or some of Marx’s earlier writings (before he succumbed to the very masculinist temptation of ‘scientific socialism’).
So it is in the domain of kinship that the ‘feminine principle’ has been most active in history ( tribal societies are all species of extended families), and women have an ‘instinctive’ affinity for it.
Why?
Because they are , then and now (barring some new genetic/social engineering that may alter this) , the bearers , and first nurturers, of new life .
Further, this new life, in the human animal, is more vulnerable than many in the animal world , and requires years of intensive caring ( that can only be assured if a modicum of relative peace prevails; and that is also the locus, in society of all societal morality).
So, women are/have been the virtual founders of the convivial order of family and domesticity: and these ‘values’ are not ‘free choices’ , but imposed by the ‘natural-social’ requirements of child rearing.
In effect, women are, and have to be, the original peace-makers.
Now there, in radically encapsulated form, one has both the essentialist and the existentialist basis for the ‘difference’ I have argued is fundamental to understanding the male/female dyad.
( v)
It is ironic that our wildest dreams never wander too far from reality, for we , apparently, know so very little other than ourselves (and sometimes not even that).
Indeed , the paucity of the human imagination is far more striking than its alleged sweep(consider the laughable limits of science-fiction when visualising ‘other’ forms of life, for instance).
So, to imagine a woman’s world may be startling at first, specially to the bigoted.
But, it is - if nothing else - necessary.
Indeed , therein may lie our only hope for a real , permanent salve ,give the depletingly repetitive pattern of masculinist conflicts/tensions in world history.
And women’s powers lie girdling us all like a vast ocean of uncharted possibilities, so we would be foolhardy to think that they are only effective when curbing , say, drunk driving a la MADD.
However, this latter example may, possibly, hold a clue.
What would it take to get the vast body of women to care deeply enough about the ills of the world ( which, sooner or later, are visited upon them) to wish to become pro-actively involved in changing the world?
Could it be , perhaps, only when their very last refuge from the wasteland of male madness is threatened with extinction?
In India, for example, the unbelievable rash of brutal, public, daylight attacks upon women has fomented a rising tide of ire of a kind that has not existed since antic Gandhian times of anti-British agitation.
But such a logos may , I think, yet be mistaken - perhaps it is MEN who now have to realize the enormous potential of women in all the regards discussed above, and thereby:
a)begin to learn from women, and alter/restrain their own ways, or b) ‘step aside’, and let women ‘manage’ the public household, or c) adopt both a) and b).
By the way, a) is no leap of fancy - it has already been achieved, typically without homage to its inspiration: Gandhi’s Satyagraha and Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience are but variants of the art of passive resistance that women have deployed, universally, with some effectiveness , if mostly within the domestic household.
It may also not be merely in the kind/quality of means deployed that women have much to teach us all: it may be , far more importantly, in the wider, ‘higher’ charter of human-societal Ends and Goals.
Of course, I am ‘only’ speculating: but is there any truth that has been gained/gleaned in science or philosophy that did not first commence with a speculative query?
Indeed, en generale, might it not be a revelation for us all to learn that Women may afford the ‘natural’ solution (s) to all Male (inspired) problems?
There is a certain poetic justice to it.
And if so: would that register another evolutionary triumph for Nature, or be just more evidence for inspired ‘Design’?
The question abides.
[©2013, R.Kanth,Harvard University]